Is this the William Friedkin who won an Oscar for The French Connection all those decades ago, then made The Exorcist? Is this the William Friedkin who has never really matched these earlier successes?  Well, yes.  And this film does not match them either.  But it will have a lot of people talking.

Bug sounds like one of those B-budget science fiction and/or horror movies of the 1950s or the cut-rate animal disaster thrillers of the mid-70s.  And, for a lot of the time, that really seems relevant.

While a momentary clue or two is given early, a long part of Bug is confined to a motel room in the middle of nowhere, USA, where Aggie (a severely deglamourised Ashley Judd) lives alone, dreads the release from prison of her ex (Harry Connick Jr), relies on drugs and booze, has a friend or two from the bar where she works and tries to console herself with the memory of her abducted son.  Doesn’t sound much like a Bugs movie.  Warning, beware the temptation to leave!

A stranger visits (Michael Shannon).  He is reticent, wary of women but polite and considerate.  Now for the bugs. 

But, better you find that out for yourselves because this is a movie that is likely to win a cult status.

Paranoia rampant… and then some.

Readers of the National Enquirer and its imagination-defying sensation-revealing ilk may well take offence at the send-up of the most bizarre hypotheses (about bugs as well as the CIA) and the welter of conspiracy theory conjectures that this throws up as if they are deadly real.  And the screenplay has the courage of its convictions, and Friedkin has never been a director to cinematically shirk slapping us in the face.  The final ten minutes are definitely worth seeing, either to believe or disbelieve, and, while Michael Shannon is a good sport to undergo all the torment that he does, Ashley Judd has some of the best hysterical scenery-chewing outbursts in a long time.  And what she says will make you shudder at infectious paranoia and madness.

The implications of this film may well bug you.

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