Sin #40: The Two Sides of Lonely

Some people are really lonely. Take Lars, for example; he’s a socially awkward young man who works in an office and doesn’t have any friends, he lives next to his brother’s house and isolates himself on most of his spare time. He’s so distant that even human touch physically hurts him.

One day something strange happens; he informs his brother and his wife that he’s found a woman he likes and that he’d like to introduce them to her. Of course they’re delighted by the news since it means that maybe Lars can eventually become an active member of the community once again and lead a normal life. The curious thing about her is that she isn’t a woman at all; she’s in fact a sex doll named Bianca and part of a delusional fantasy created by Lars.

“Lars and the Real Girl” isn’t about madness or even loneliness but rather understanding and forgiveness. With its premise it could work as either drama or comedy but the film is wise and tender about its subject and empathizes with Lars. Even though the attitude of Lars’s community isn’t realistic, there’s a naïve sense of joy and at the end it even leaves us with a smile.

On the other hand loneliness can indeed lead to madness. Imagine a stranger arriving on a barren wasteland of a town. He can be kind and somewhat charming but there’s something odd about him lurking beneath the surface; a woman starts falling for him and invites him to live with her and after that very strange things happen that include a crazy paranoid conspiracy theory and the notion of a bug infestation.

“Bug”, directed by William Friedkin (who also made “The Exorcist”) is a diabolical thriller that gradually becomes more and more ominous. It starts with simple characters that eventually delve into madness and never come back. The last scenes of the film are so far the deep end that we admire the acting even more since the actors go to risky places losing all sense of vanity in the process.

The movie resembles the play it was based on since it mostly happens on a single set and uses a lot of dialogue. Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd are simply amazing but this hardly qualifies as a feel-good movie. It may begin as a movie about loneliness but it ends being about disease and utter lunacy.

“Lars and the Real Girl” and “Bug” are completely different movies, both in tone and structure, but both deal with troubled human beings. “Lars” suggests redemption for its hero while “Bug” pretty much implodes at the end. Both films are interesting and risky experiments that don’t settle for conventions.