Bug (2007)

William Friedkin's Bug arrives in a seedy Oklahoma motel room and never leaves, which is the correct decision. Adapted by Tracy Letts from his own 1996 play, the film tracks Agnes White (Ashley Judd), a waitress at a lesbian bar, as she takes in a drifter named Peter (Michael Shannon) and descends with him into delusional parasitosis. The cast is white and the multicultural ledger stays empty. R.C., Agnes's lesbian friend, drifts through the early scenes as ambient texture, a detail of the world instead of a statement about it. The film is content to let her exist. That is all it does with her.

The engine here is psychosis, not politics. Peter claims the government infected him with biological agents during the Gulf War, and the paranoia spreads from him to Agnes like a contagion. This is anti-government dread of the old conspiratorial variety, not a critique of capital or class. Mental illness gets treated as a horror spectacle, a breakdown to be watched through a child's microscope, never as an identity to be celebrated. The body is a site of infestation. Nobody is declaring it beautiful.

Friedkin insisted the film was a black comedy love story, and the marketing disagreed, and audiences handed it a rare F. What they received was a lean, unrelenting chamber piece that shows its two lovers dousing each other in gasoline instead of explaining how we should feel about it. There is no sermon here, no moralizing, no lecture. For a film about bugs, the absence of preaching is its own small mercy.