Bug (2007)
Directed by William Friedkin
Written by Tracy Letts
Starring Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Harry Connick Jr.
Release Date May 25th, 2007
Published August 10th, 2023
Legendary director William Friedkin died on Monday, August 7th, 2023. On the next episode of the Everyone is a Critic Movie Review Podcast, we will be talking about the remarkable career of William Friedkin including his well known classics, The Exorcist, The French Connection, Sorcerer, and Cruising, as well as his underrated gems, The Hunted and the movie I am writing about today, Bug, starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. Bug is a brilliantly paranoid thriller that takes advantage of Ashley Judd's innate sympathetic qualities and Michael Shannon's talent for skin-crawling creepiness that you can't look away from.
At one time, in the late 1990's Ashley Judd seemed on the verge of becoming one of the top stars in the industry. After the twin successes of Kiss The Girls and Double Jeopardy, Judd was the in demand female star of the moment. Sadly, those pot-boiler mysteries that made her a star also lead to her type casting as the heroine of ever more ludicrous mystery thrillers which reached their nadir with the unwatchable, alleged thriller Twisted in 2003. Of course, what really happened to Ashley Judd's career was less about type casting and more about Harvey Weinstein's blacklist of actresses who refused to sleep with him.
Nevertheless, after taking nearly two years away from the movies, Judd returned in a remarkably different role in the small scale, buzzy thriller Bug. Helmed by maverick director William Friedkin, Bug offered Ashley Judd a career remaking performance as a drug addicted woman sucked into the insanity of the first man to offer her positive attention in years. This is a brave and bold, full bodied performance that should have brought Judd back to big time stardom. She did keep working after Bug, but not nearly in the kind of challenging roles that a performance like this one should have earned for her.
In Bug, Ashley Judd stars as Agnes White a waitress at what is likely the only honky-tonk lesbian bar in all of Oklahoma, though Agnes is not a lesbian herself. She has in fact survived a horribly abusive marriage to Jerry (Harry Connick Jr) and the loss of their son who was kidnapped. Jerry is recently out of jail which may explain a series of hang up phone calls to Agnes's room at a flea pit motel, appropriately named the Rustic Motel. Into Agnes's lonely desperation comes an odd, somewhat creepy, but gentle stranger named Peter Evans (Michael Shannon). Peter is a gulf war vet who attached himself to Agnes's friend R.C (Lynn Collins) and was invited to Agnes' hotel room for a night of drinking and drugs, though he does not partake.
The encounter leads to Peter spending the night, he sleeps on the floor, Agnes on the bed. Soon the two are getting close and things do eventually get physical but soon afterward bad things start happening. A seemingly inconsequential bug bite begins a paranoid delusional breakdown that quickly leads the schizophrenic Peter and the lonely desperate Agnes to a heart stopping denouement. Friedkin's talent for nasty visuals, honed on The Exorcist, is on full display in Bug. As Shannon and Judd begin to feed each other's madness, Friedkin fearlessly plumbs the depths of that madness with skin crawling, stomach turning visual touches that make Bug a visceral fright.
