Bug (2006)

Beat by beat, Bug is gripping: It has that feverish compression of great theater, but director William Friedkin gets inside it, so it's never stagy.

A film of excruciating intensity, a psychodrama that infects the imagination.

This is a movie about the dangers of letting love rob you of your reason and cut you off from the world, and, bugs in the bloodstream or not, who hasn't been there?

Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon (who reprises his stage persona) never allow us to categorize the main characters as one-dimensional nut jobs but two emotionally fractured souls who retreat into paranoid delusion.

Bug won't get under your skin as much as it will assault you with its ghastly claustrophobic drama and over-the-top performances.

The cheesy soundtrack and the lacklustre acting undermine [director Friedkin's] efforts at turning an intelligent play into a scary movie.

This "smaller" experiment turns out to be William Friedkin's best film in over 20 years.

Claustrophobic paranoia provides the squishy center of Tracy Letts's Off Broadway play, Friedkin swims in it

While not really a "horror" film, "Bug" contains more weirdness, tension and suspense than most other "genre" releases last year.

Letts' story is ultimately an extreme cautionary tale about how a little bit of passion can make you do magnificently fucked-up things.

Before it completely goes off the rails in its final 20 minutes, Bug generally comes off as a slow-moving yet exceedingly well-acted drama...

It starts off like a horror film, or like a modern-day Tennessee Williams piece and then transmutes into ... something very different indeed.