funnels into a harsh cocktail of zombie action and unmistakably political intrigue, has a simpler, more primal, and basically as honorable intention: It wants to drive us out of our heads. That it certainly does. Stuffed for most of the movie in a tiny, bleak Oklahoma motel room, the film’s main subject, Agnes (a supreme Ashley Judd), snorts coke and smokes pot, numbing herself alternatively to avoid a present aimlessness and a past littered with violence and longtime despair.
One night a friend brings over Peter (Michael Shannon), a drifter whose peculiar, placid temperament is deceptively beguiling, and Agnes quickly takes to him. To describe the plot further would be both difficult and, I suspect, pointless, since it is a descent into madness that doesn’t always makes sense but is too intense to let us take notice. The characters alternate between tenderness, offbeat intelligence and almost unbelievable plateaus of delusion.
The film posits many possible answers for how they enable each other’s mania, each of them reasonably pointed, but they become immaterial as frenzied paranoia takes over the show. Tracy Letts adapted his own play for the minimalist screenplay, and his action is typically stationary and talky, sustained more by its minor observations than its action. He stocks his characters with oblique backstories and irreparable psychological wounds, never really elaborated upon because it’s not really necessary—it’s not the source of the madness here but the process and aftermath that are ultimately of interest.
The movie gets loud and dangerously close to silly in the final sequence, a long and unremittingly frantic climax in which Judd and Shannon declare themselves insect royalty while waving their arms in the air, but its bizarre indulgences are effective with the aid of the director William Friedkin’s ingeniously complicit view of the characters.
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