William Friedkin and Tracy Letts are a match made in heaven—or, perhaps more accurately, hell. Friedkin, a Chicago native, made a name for himself directing The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), brutal dramas that became touchstones of the so-called “New Hollywood.” Letts, a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble and a Pulitzer Prize winner for August: Osage County, launched his career as a playwright with Killer Joe, about a sadistic Dallas cop who moonlights as a hit man, and followed it with Bug, chronicling the romance between a lonely middle-aged woman and a paranoid schizophrenic who believes his skin is crawling with insects. Letts and Friedkin first collaborated on a screen adaptation of Bug that won the FIPRESCI Award at the 2006 Cannes film festival and was praised for its claustrophobic staging and hallucinatory mise-en-scene. Now they’ve returned with a movie version of Killer Joe, starring Matthew McConaughey as the ruthless title character.
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As the two movies reveal, Friedkin and Letts share an appetite for intense encounters in enclosed spaces between people of questionable morality. These encounters tend to result in bursts of extreme violence, which Friedkin makes as graphic as possible. From The Exorcist to Cruising (1980) to Jade (1995), Friedkin has often pushed the boundaries in his treatment of sex and violence, and these new independent features, free of studio constraints, have allowed him to plumb the depths of his signature themes. The nihilism of The Exorcist, the blurred line between good and evil in Cruising and The French Connection, and, perhaps most important, the menacing comedy of his Harold Pinter adaptation, The Birthday Party (1968), are all amplified in Killer Joe, whose NC-17 rating the director probably considers a badge of honor.
Friedkin was in the audience when Bug premiered off-Broadway and quickly approached Letts with the idea of a film version; the playwright set to work on a screenplay while Friedkin raised $4 million from independent producers and eventually won distribution from Lionsgate Films. Friedkin saw Bug as a suspense picture, while Letts considers the play a love story; the result is somewhere in between. The romance between Agnes (Ashley Judd) and Peter (Michael Shannon) blossoms by way of folie à deux, as she gradually buys into his delusions. The majority of the film unfolds in the seedy motel room where Agnes lives, and the heightened sense of isolation is what makes Bug a horror film. Yet Friedkin is less interested in the tenets of the genre than in the idea of pushing the audience to its limits. The film ends ambiguously, bloodily, and, to say the least, unhappily.
Directed by William Friedkin
