Fantastic Fest 2009

The world is going badly. With this troubling and funny adaptation of a play by Tracy Letts (who also wrote the script), the author of The Exorcist and French Connection delivers a black vision of a world suffering from paranoia generated by terrorist threats, wars and all kinds of other secret manipulations: mystical, political, economical. Agnes (Ashley Judd), a waitress living in fear of her husband's release (played by Harry Connick, Jr.) from prison, bathes in the sordid loneliness of her motel room lost in the desert. While she waits on Peter (Michael Shannon), a strange vagrant who speaks in enigmas, she believes she's found company to fill an existential vacuum. Except here we have an invasion of insects (that they alone can see) and the young man's insane conspiracy theories involve her little by little into the most radical madness.