Exellent acting. It's started good, but after a while the movie was like listening to the craziest Youtube educated conspiracist on full meltdown mode. Judd's character change was too drastic and too fast.
Could've been like "The Fly", but it was garbage instead
Review by whitsbrainVIP 5BlockedParent2022-01-15T17:22:22Z
I thought I was this huge William Friedkin fan. Then I realized that the only movies that I've ever seen that he has directed are "The Exorcist", "Cruising", and "Deal of the Century". Not exactly high-ranking on my personal favorite Directors list.
One other amazing thing he directed was a story featured in the 1980's revival of "The Twilight Zone" called "Nightcrawlers". "Bug" feels a lot like a new interpretation of that same "Nightcrawlers" story. That's a good thing.
"Nightcrawlers" was intense and so is "Bug", but "Bug" takes some hard turns into weirdness that I still can't tell if I enjoyed or not. I don't want to spoil it even though this is ten years old, but I'll just state that I want to view this as the conspiracy theories of Peter (Michael Shannon) being true as opposed to psychosis. And while I'm on the topic of Shannon, I couldn't help but laugh at him jumping around a bedroom naked for about 10 minutes. Friedkin manages to hide Shannon's naughty bits similarly to how Jay Roach kept Mike Myers's family jewels concealed in "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery". It was inadvertently funny and took me out of the story. Set that aside though, and Shannon is off the rails nuts and excellent at it, by the way.
Ashley Judd is pretty amazing here. I'm not a fan, but she impressed me a lot. I liked her character until the end when she falls off the deep end. I'm wondering what the average Ashley Judd fan would think about "Bug". Actually, I'm having fun imagining the shock they would be in.