Watched without preconception, William Friedkin’s Bug would be a flawlessly frantic hour and a half. Living in the end room of a mythically run-down motel eons from anywhere, Agnes (Ashley Judd) is a dead-end woman who spends her days trying to forget that sad, inexplicable thing that happened so long ago. Neither drugs, nor the frequent, wordless phone calls from her just-paroled, abusive ex-husband Jerry (Harry Connick Jr.), rattle her stasis misery.
And then Peter (Michael Shannon), a subdued Sling Blade-y drifter shows up at her door. “I’m not really anything,” he says in a cryptically sincere voice, trying to explain who he is. But Agnes gets him. Peter sleeps over, and wakes up in the middle of the night, bitten by a bug. He grabs it between his fingers. Agnes doesn’t see it. Peter insists he’s holding a tiny, ravenous aphid. Agnes looks harder and sees it. Or does she?
Welcome to Bug’s psychological jungle. Tracy Letts, who penned the original off-Broadway hit, also wrote the screenplay, and his tilting suspension of social norms survives the transition. Peter is convinced there’s an infestation. When Jerry barges in, he finds an upside-down forest of fly strips and Peter hunched over a microscope, searching a sample of his own blood for aphids. Ordinarily violent, Jerry just chuckles. This disorientation makes you wobble. Friedkin’s sprightly audio manipulation — conjuring sounds that you hear, but that the characters may or may not — knocks you full-on into a centripetal blur of paranoia and reality.
Peter and Agnes cling together in the surreal storm, and soon Peter is ready to share his secret: He was a guinea pig in unspeakable military bioweapons experiments, but he’s gone AWOL and now the bugs under his skin, and the shadowy figures who put them there, are out to get him.
This would be quite the hoary old thriller cliché, if Bug were a thriller. But it’s not. Thrillers and horror movies build suspense between the natural and supernatural, the mundane the near-unbelievable. Is that just the UPS guy knocking at the door, or an undead serial killer? To work, the impossible has to be a legitimate possibility. Helped by Shannon, whose performance becomes markedly more lucid the crazier Peter’s mutterings get, Letts toys with the idea that Peter’s paranoid fantasies aren’t as unhinged as they seem.
He’s really getting at something much more frightening though. By the last act, when the camera reveals every surface covered in tinfoil, shimmering with the wan blue light of a half-dozen bug zappers, Peter is clearly crazy.
Bug isn’t about him or his bugs. It’s a study of Agnes, and the possibility that sane people, faced with a reality that’s too painful or lonely to bear, can lead themselves (perhaps even eagerly) down the rabbit hole to utter and catastrophic insanity. The film climaxes with the question of just how far Agnes has really gone, and what price she’ll pay for going. The answer is deliriously intense and satisfying.
Yet, as you collect yourself, something still isn’t right. Bug is an excellent film. It’s just not what you expected. For weeks, commercials for Bug — strobe light flashes of scarred torsos, gasps and proud exclamations of “from the director of The Exorcist” — have been promising a much less interesting, garden-variety horror flick. In select theaters, internet ads boast, it will be running with a special preview of arch splatter-fest Hostel: Part II.
A film’s marketing would seem to be something completely separate from its content, of course. Discussing it in a review would be like assessing a book based on its binding or a painting on its frame. It would elevate the craft of advertising to a near-equal status with the art of filmmaking.
Yet, movie marketing has become so ubiquitous, so visually sophisticated and intense, that it functions as a part of the audience’s experience of the film. Commercials and trailers are prefaces. They raise expectations, introduce characters, and define parameters. If you’ve ever walked out of a theater mumbling “the trailer was much better,” this is nothing new to you.
If it’s reasonable to factor the first chapter of a book into its overall score, it’s just as reasonable to consider a film’s pre-release publicity wave. Bug’s blitz promised a movie much different than what it delivered. No major foul. It does mean something though. If, as the credits are rolling, you’re distracted — trying to reconcile what the studio said the movie was with what it actually was — some of its immediate, irretrievable impact is lost.
Bug is a complex, intelligent story that skates around genres; probably not the easiest one to succinctly advertise. But Lions Gate made a memorable movie. The commercials can’t be that much harder.
– Louis Wittig is freelance writer, editor, and copy editor in New York City.