She's haunted by a terrible, terrible loss. As if her life couldn't be any cheerier, she's being stalked by her psycho ex-husband, Jerry (Connick), who's just been sprung from the clink.

Agnes' co-worker R.C. (Collins) introduces the lonely woman, who can't seem to go grocery shopping without suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, to a good-looking guy she's met by the name of Peter (Shannon, who reprises his role from several noteworthy stage productions). Peter seems very nice, if a bit awkward. He talks about weird things like the hazards of isotopes in smoke detectors, and has a bit of a freakout when he thinks he hears a cricket chirping in Agnes' motel room. But he really does seem very nice. ...

Agnes takes a shine to the guy. She's concerned when Peter suffers a bug bite in her fleabag crash pad. But is it just a bug bite? Peter thinks there's much more to the bite than meets the eye, even though the bug in question doesn't seem to meet the eye at all. That "much more" involves secret experiments, vast shadowy networks of machines and the even more shadowy "people who work the machines."

Who are these people? What secrets is Peter himself hiding? Just what is he so worried about, and why does he obsess about bugs that other people can't see?

More than just a creature feature

First things first—ignore the marketing of this movie. Bug is not the creature feature you'd expect it to be based on those very carefully edited trailers and ads that have been playing in heavy rotation. Bug is a much better movie than the flick it's being shilled as. Trying to sell Bug by slapping a preview of the first five minutes of Hostel: Part II in front of it is like trying to sell Arthur Miller's The Crucible with a preview of the latest Witchboard sequel.

Bug, which won the International Critic's Prize at Cannes last year, is a painfully unique experience. It's a hyper-cinematic ... play. A night of intimate, off-Broadway theater that feels like it's shown in IMAX. Friedkin amps Bug with hebephrenic editing and multilayered sound editing worthy of a Matrix sequel. But the movie requires the same kind of investment that live theater does. You have to extend to the screen the same kind of attention you would to actors performing 10 feet from you. Bug punches through your sternum like a big movie, but it's set in a single cramped and dingy room and, even more narrowly, in the cramped and shattered minds of the two leads. The movie throws you off balance as its characters become more unbalanced, thanks to a gift that Friedkin has demonstrated in movies ranging from The French Connection to the undeservedly reviled Cruising to To Live and Die in L.A. Broken reality is presented through soul-peeling dialogue between two destroyed human beings and through the Apocalypse Now-like sound collage of a ceiling fan and a barely functioning AC unit.

Bug is a work of science-fictional paranoia with glimmers of the aphid-ridden delusions that make up Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. It's a one-room, three-act apocalypse in which shared paranoia can lead to a kind of bug-crawling hysterical pregnancy that, even though destructive, is still created out of a desperate and freakish kind of love.

The performances are all great, and they need to be; this is a horror movie in which the monsters are all of the mind. Judd shows a fearless intelligence throughout, even as her mind flies apart at the climax, and Shannon creates Aronofsky-like worlds of weirdness with a cock of his head and a constriction of his throat. There are some misfires in Bug. A few crash edits of creepy-crawlies are groaningly obvious, there's a loss of narrative flow in a few spots, and the kind of blackout that works very well on stage fails magnificently when done on film. Still, despite these flaws, Bug is a breakthrough movie that, through its narrow scope, pushes the envelope of the horror film in a way that hasn't been done since Roman Polanski's Repulsion.