Director – William Friedkin, Screenplay/Based on the Play Bug (1996) by Tracy Letts, Producers – Kimberly C. Anderson, Michael Burns, Gary Huckabay, Malcolm Petal, Andreas Schardt & Holly Wiersma, Photography – Michael Grady, Music – Brian Tyler, Special Effects Supervisor – David K. Nami & Bob Vasquez, Makeup Effects – Christien Tinsley, Production Design – Franco Carbone. Production Company – L.I.F.T. Productions/DMK Mediafonds International/Inferno Distribution LLC.
Cast
Ashley Judd (Agnes White), Michael Shannon (Peter Evans), Harry Connick, Jr. (Jerry Goss), Lynn Collins (R.C.), Brian F. O’Byrne (Dr Philip Sweet)
Plot
Agnes White lives on her own in the rural Rustic Motel while working as a waitress at a local bar. Her friend/co-worker R.C. comes over to party accompanied by Peter Evans. Peter stays on after R.C. leaves. When Peter says he has nowhere to go, Agnes lets him stay on the couch and they subsequently sleep together. At the same time, Agnes’s ex Jerry Goss has just been released from jail and returns, aggressively demanding that they get back together. Peter claims that Agnes’s room is infested with bugs and begins spraying and trying to catch them. At first, she cannot see anything. Peter soon he finds the bugs are festering under his skin and begins tearing them out. Others warn that Peter is a former soldier who has escaped from a mental institution. Peter increasingly comes to see a deep conspiratorial nature behind the bugs and the belief they are being used for mind control purposes.
William Friedkin (1935-2023) was one of the great directors of the 1970s. After emerging from tv, Friedkin hit his stride with the huge successes of his fifth film French Connection (1971), followed by the phenomenon that was The Exorcist (1973). Friedkin’s works subsequent to that were often hit and miss ranging between critical hits but box-office flops such as Sorcerer (1977), To Live and Die in L.A. (1986) and Rampage (1987) to those that were neither such as Cruising (1980), Deal of the Century (1983) and Jade (1996). Friedkin has made a surprising number of genre films (see below for such).
As the 2000s came around and he entered into his seventies, Friedkin’s significance began to wane. His films during this period include modest works like the war drama Rules of Engagement (2000), the action film The Hunted (2003) and his final film, the historical drama The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023), in between a handful of tv movies and episodes of various series.
Friedkin’s best interesting work this side of the 2000s came in his collaborations with playwright Tracy Letts, Bug here, based on Letts’ 1996 play, and the subsequent Killer Joe (2011), based on Letts’ 1993 play. The two of these were films that Friedkin shot on scaled-back budgets using few sets, which gave him the greater freedom to push the envelope in what he did. Both films almost seem as though it was Friedkin returning to his early of shooting for live television and bringing with him what he had learned as a commercial filmmaker to create a duo of tight, actor-driven dramatic works. In perhaps figuring they are the last films he would get to make, both also show Friedkin really going for broke.
Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon search for bugs
Bug was made before Michael Shannon had started to become a well-known A-list name. (He also played the role of Peter in the stage version of Bug and started his acting career as part of the same theatre ensemble as Tracy Letts). In the opening scenes, Shannon’s awkward, slightly blank manner is something that perfectly suits the character. But then oh boy does he really let everything go. The other actor who takes you aback is singer Harry Connick, Jr, who has never looked more handsome in a part and plays with a cocky macho dangerousness that steps well over to the dark side as he starts slapping Ashley Judd around.
Michael Shannon’s performance becomes increasingly more deranged. He starts out normal, becomes slightly obsessive about bugs in the room before the jolt scene where he is tearing at his own skin and violently throwing himself across the bed. Things becomes become quite disturbing with the hard-to-watch scenes where he is wrenching out his own teeth, or the scene immediately after that where he emerges from the bathroom and we see his body covered in cuts and wounds where he has dug in to get bugs out.
The film follows fairly much where the play would have made its scene cuts. About the point where we cut to the entire room covered in aluminium foil, Shannon covered in cuts and Ashley some of them too, Bug enters a whole new level of deranged. The point should also be made that we never see any of the bugs. At the outset, Ashley Judd is straining to see the ones that Michael Shannon points out, although later on she is seeing them, while Lynn Collins flatly denies seeing anything under the microscope. The point where Brian F. O’Byrne enters the scene claiming to be a psychologist turns everything on its head, although equally we are not a hundred percent certain that we can trust him – he sits and smokes from Ashley’s crack pipe and far too easily seems to dangle the promise of reuniting her with her son to get her cooperation. All before that particular scene arrives at a shocking end.
Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon after trying to remove the bugs from under their skin
This is also the point that Michael Shannon’s performance goes completely off the rails into a whole other arena of brilliance as he grabs Ashley Judd and is babbling in a frenetic word salad that seems to wind in just about every Conspiracy Theory out there including CIA experiments involving programmed bugs, Jonestown, the Bilderberg conference and you name it. Just as disturbing is the fact that by then Ashley Judd has joined him and is sharing in the illusion. At this point, Bug has become quite an astonishing film. It remains brilliantly deranged and uncompromising right until the very last scene.
William Friedkin’s other genre films are:– the classic, highly influential demonic possession film The Exorcist (1973); Cruising (1980), a serial killer thriller set in the world of gay leather bondage; Deal of the Century (1983), a futuristic black comedy about arms smuggling; Rampage (1987), a courtroom serial killer thriller that debated the Insanity Plea; The Guardian (1990) about a baby-snatching Druidic babysitter; and The Hunted (2003) about a man hunting humans for sport.
Tracy Letts has written a number of other films including August: Osage County (2013) based on his play and the adaptation of The Woman in the Window (2021), while he has also made acting appearances in a number of other films and tv shows.
