Wednesday, August 01, 2007

MIFF 2007 Tues 31 August

BUG (dir William Friedken, USA, 2006)

Part of the 'Full Moon Fever' horror program at MIFF this year, the latest film from the director of The Exorcist is an exploration of paranoia and psychological terror. Had it descended into full, infectious body-horror I think I would have liked it a lot more. As it was, Bug just sort of bugged me.

Agnes (Ashley Judd) is a waitress in a down-at-hills lesbian bar, and is pretty down on her luck herself. Her estranged husband (Harry Connick Junior) is in jail, and she's dreading him getting out. She lives in a motel room, and it's here, one night, that a chance encounter with a drifter, Peter (Michael Shannon) leads her into a nightmare of bad acid trip proportions.

Peter, you see, is infected. There's bugs in his blood, and before long, bugs everywhere - soon, they're in Agnes, too...

The second act of this traditionally-plotted three-act drama is high-strung and effective, and certain key scenes - including an ominous nighttime shot of the hotel from high above - are quietly unsettling.

Unfortunately the tightly-buttoned nature of the story - adapted by Tracy Letts from his own stage play - felt constrained rather than claustrophobic, and neither Judd nor Shannon developed the level of intensity needed to convince me of their characters' shared desperation.

The third act, which could have taken us to a much darker and more disturbing place simply by showing us more of what the two main characters were convinced they could see, definitely failed to rachet up the terror, even as the actors themselves grew more frenzied. There's a nice scene late in the film of a free-flowing, stream of conciousness conspiracy theory being generated before your eyes , but overall, the film failed to unsettle me (save for a gruesomely effective little sequence involving teeth and a pair of pliers).

Great cinematography and a director who is clearly trying to do something inventive with the material, but overall, the plot itself and especially the characterisation by the two leads for me, let this film down.

BUG: Two stars



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