Set almost entirely within a seedy motel somewhere in the badlands of Oklahoma, the film charts the symbiotic, ultimately apocalyptical relationship between Agnes (Ashely Judd), a lonely cocktail waitress reeling from the years-long disappearance of her young son and the return of her abusive ex-con ex, and mysterious drifter Peter (Michael Shannon), on the run from someone or something. Following their awkward meet-squalid\u2014Agnes\u2019s co-worker and sole friend brings Peter to her room, where he sits back as they rail lines and pound booze\u2014Agnes makes the rash decision to let Peter move in with her. The two become lovers, finding solace from their self-imposed isolation. But within hours of their pairing, Peter\u2014who we learn is a Gulf War vet currently gone AWOL from a VA hospital where he claims he was experimented on\u2014starts seeing bugs in the bedsheets. It\u2019s not long before Agnes, who prior to meeting Peter has been plagued by mysterious phone calls, starts seeing them too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What follows is a full-throttle descent into madness, murder, and self-immolation. Theirs is a shared psychosis\u2014folie \u00e0 deux\u2014fueled by their individual trauma and hard drug use (the film\u2019s elliptical structure makes the viewer fill in some gaps regarding the latter plot point). By the berserk third act, both they and the motel where they\u2019ve holed up have undergone monstrous transformations, and they find themselves trapped in a tinfoiled hell that is more frightening than anything in The Exorcist<\/em>. And yet, there is still a very real connection between Agnes and Peter, one that can\u2019t be accounted for via pat psychological terms, just as their paranoia can\u2019t entirely be dismissed as imagined: Letts (adapting his own play for screen) and Friedkin layer in enough bizarre, unexplainable moments\u2014such as when Peter\u2019s doctor, who shows up near the end to take him back to the hospital, casually takes a hit off a crack pipe; or two short mid-and-post credit scenes that call into question the reality of the film\u2019s climax\u2014to keep things ambiguous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, Bug <\/em>is less interested in diagnosing its characters\u2014even as the closely studied symptoms of real illnesses, from schizophrenia to delusional parasitosis to Gulf War syndrome, lend a visceral sense of verisimilitude\u2014than exploring how a dangerous relationship forms and how a couple changes within it. It\u2019s easy to explain away Peter\u2019s thoughts about microscopic spyware and electrical discharges as symptoms of combat-induced PTSD, just as it\u2019s simple enough to point to Agnes\u2019s maternal trauma and history of abuse to glean why she attaches herself so quickly and drastically to this stranger and his delusions. Harder to reckon with is the possibility that what makes both of them so susceptible to self-destruction is, first and foremost, loneliness, something all of us experience on a regular basis. As Agnes tells Peter during one of her last moments of lucid reflection: \u201cI don\u2019t know why I love you so much. I don\u2019t even know you very well. I guess I\u2019d rather talk with you about bugs than talk about nothing with nobody.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This moment plays all the more startling now, in our current age of mass delusion, where these paranoid ideas have infected the minds of millions of lonely people via the internet and other forms of mass communication. Letts, who hails from Oklahoma, first wrote Bug<\/em> in the wake of Timothy McVeigh\u2019s bombing of the Oklahoma State Building, after he realized<\/a> \u201cthere was this whole strata of society harboring these conspiratorial ideas\u2026you realized\u2026it was going to spread like a brushfire, that the internet was tinder for conspiracy theories.\u201d Cut to 30 years after Letts first staged the play, and 20 since Friedkin adapted it, in a post-9\/11, post-COVID, post-QANON, post-Epstein Files ravaged world, and nothing in Bug <\/em>plays as heightened anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n (Again though, the conspiracy theories in Bug, <\/em>like those in real life, <\/em>are complicated by the confirmed examples Peter explicitly cites, including the MK Ultra and Tuskegee syphilis experiments.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which isn\u2019t to say Bug<\/em> has lost any of its shock value. Friedkin and his game cast\u2014Ashley Judd shows a side of herself theretofore and since unseen (it\u2019s truly a shame she was so mired in potboiler fare during her prime, as she might have proven an heir to Gena Rowlands) while Michael Shannon, who reprises his role from the original stage version, firmly establishes himself as the <\/em>most intense leading man of his generation\u2014go all in on the brutality of the material. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite Friedkin\u2019s aversion <\/a>to Bug\u2019s <\/em>advertisement and reception as a horror film, it certainly works as one, although it has more in common with the French New Extremity than the American body horror\/torture porn examples of the Aughts. Friedkin is correct in describing it as a dark comedy, and watched in the year of our lord 2026, it plays very much like a forebearer to Eddington<\/em> and Bugonia.<\/em>(Letts and Friedkin\u2019s follow up collaboration of five years later, Killer Joe<\/em>, is an even darker comedy.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n At its sick, black heart though, Bug <\/em>is a romance, which is why it\u2019s so fitting that, at this very moment, there is a new, acclaimed production<\/a> of Letts\u2019s play on Broadway, starring his real-life wife Carrie Coon. Given the metamorphosis that Bug <\/em>has undergone in the decades since it came first to stage and then to screen, it may well be THE <\/em>romance of our era, the single most important entomological examination of love in the time of paranoia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Bug” is streaming on Tubi<\/a>, PlutoTV<\/a>, Plex<\/a> and Starz<\/a>, and is available for digital rental or purchase<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCrooked Marquee\u2019s Bad Romances\u201d is an annual spotlight on anti-Valentine\u2019s Day favorites. Follow this year\u2019s recommendations here<\/a>; you can also read our entries for 2025<\/a>, 2024<\/a>, and 2023<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/bug2-1024x576.jpg\")
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