BUG [R]
If there were an award for “Ickiest Performance,” then Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon would win for theirs in this disturbing drama. Audiences expecting the typical mindless gross-out suggested by the film’s marketing will be disappointed, but director William Friedkin, responsible for countless soiled trousers since his The Exorcist in 1973, really amps up the suspense and psychological terror here. Judd (Come Early Morning) plays Agnes, a lonely and highly impressionable woman who is smitten by kindly but deluded drifter Peter, played by Shannon (World Trade Center). Peter convinces Agnes of his belief that the doctors in the Army hospital he escaped from planted egg sacs in him, meant to generate millions of information-gathering insects that can move from person-to-person-to-person. Friedkin establishes a sense of place and isolation early on, priming the dingy Texas rest stop town for all manner of mind-made horror, which he executes with skilled layering. Shannon plays Peter with warmth, so that by the time we realize he is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, we are right beside him, holding the light for him so that he can excise another egg sac with a razor blade. Judd, too, sells her role, making us buy her trauma survivor in need of the kind of human connection that makes regular people do downright nutty things. It is Friedkin’s best work in two decades, and while it will not top The Exorcist, it will survive countless years as the kind of movie friends recommend to unsuspecting friends, like bugs moving from person-to-person-to-person. –Robert Newton