King of the Ants (2003)

King of the Ants is a 2003 film from director Stuart Gordon. It is based on a novel by writer Charlie Higson, who also wrote the screenplay for the film. The film played at various festivals, but was not released wide theatrically due to its grim nature and content. The film was produced by Gordon, Higson and George Wendt (whom Gordon previously knew from their days in the Chicago theatre community).

The film follows the story of Sean Crawley (Chris McKenna), a struggling young man trying to make ends meet by painting houses in suburban Los Angeles. One day, Sean meets "Duke" Wayne (George Wendt), who introduces Sean to his boss, a shady developer named Ray Matthews (Daniel Baldwin). Ray hires Sean as a spy, and orders him to follow Eric Gatley (Ron Livingston), an accountant who has been investigating Ray's company. Problems start when Ray, while drunk, offers Sean $13,000 to kill Eric. Sean accepts his offer and, although ambivalent, ends up killing Gatley by breaking into his house and beating him to death. When Sean goes to collect his pay, however, he is double-crossed and when he persists that they pay him, he is kidnapped and taken to Ray's secluded farm. It emerges that Matthews never had any intent on paying Sean for the killing, for he only wanted to use and eliminate him. But Sean survives from having a bullet put in his head when he reveals that he had taken Gatley's work file of evidence and hidden it along with his documentation of events leading to the murder. When torture fails to make him disclose the whereabouts of the file, Sean is then brutally beaten about the head with golf clubs many times by Ray and his henchmen daily for weeks, in an effort to destroy his memory. After suffering a heavy amount of trauma, Sean escapes, killing Duke, and finds his way to a downtown homeless shelter where Gatley's widow, Susan (Kari Wuhrer), takes him under her wing, oblivious to his role in her personal tragedy. After she nurses him back to normal, he feels he has been reborn and they become lovers and he moves into her house. But after a few weeks, Susan finds his file describing the murder and, enraged, physically attacks him. Defending himself, Sean accidentally kills her. Having lost what he saw as his redemption and rebirth, more angry and cynical than ever, Sean returns to Ray's farm and methodically and ruthlessly exacts revenge on his captors, killing all of them but saving Matthews for last, and then sets the farmhouse on fire and walks off into the sunset to look for a new kind of life elsewhere. The title of the film refers to an episode after the murder, when Sean and Duke are at the zoo and Duke is musing about the game of deciding which animal most closely resembles a person, not physically, but on a deeper level. After roughing Sean up to discourage him from pursuing his quest for payment, he disparagingly remarks that he's found which animal resembles Sean; an ant.