Bug stars Ashley Judd as a haggard small town waitress caught up in a spin cycle of poor choices and revisited consequences. She hooks up with a quiet and nervous but kindly drifter (Michael Shannon, above right) who turns out to be an Army deserter, and it’s not long before his paranoid rantings about parasitic bugs in his blood stream have rubbed off on her, and they’re feeding off of one another’s wide-eyed, rampantly increasing obsession.

Bug tangentially recalls certain thrillers of containment like Cube,
movies which are constructed, at least to some degree, around a plot
device or setting that explains their limited production means. Another
movie Bug recalls in fits and starts, actually, is director Richard Linklater’s Tape, another stage-born, three-character piece, unfolding in a single dingy hotel room, in which old transgressions and recrimination are dragged out into the ugly, fluorescent light. Like Tape, Bug courses with a similar airborne tension born
of unreliable characters and shifting rationales. Unlike Linklater’s
film, though, Bug‘s act breaks are hard and
discrete, and if many of its set pieces individually contain a queasy, goosing
energy, in aggregate there’s not a smooth plane of ascension to all the
dizzied-up paranoia. Things become panicky, but remain willfully ambiguous. For director Friedkin, these buggy characters are enough of a reason to submit to the film. Those who enjoy arthouse character studies will likely agree, but mainstream audiences looking for the next big psychological disturbance
will have to wait a few weeks until Hostel II. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.