Movie Review: 'Bubble' Steven Soderbergh's Forgotten Masterpiece

Bubble (2006)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Written by Coleman Hough

Starring Debbie Doebereiner, Dustin James Ashley, Misty Dawn Wilkins

Release Date January 27th, 2006

Published January 26th, 2025

In 2006 Steven Soderbergh, the multiple-times Oscar nominee and preeminent auteur launched a new career as a film entrepreneur. With the help of billionaire Mark Cuban, Soderbergh attempted to change the way movies are distributed to the masses. The idea? Day and date releasing. Soderbergh's then new film, the low budget indie flick, Bubble, was released to theaters, TV and DVD all in less than a week.

Does this mean that Soderbergh invented day and date releasing? No, or maybe, it's debatable if he was the pioneer in that idea. What is not debatable is that Bubble is an intriguing little experiment in its own right. The small-town murder mystery starring non-professional actors and shot on location by Soderbergh with a single camera, is a hypnotic, disturbing little flick about small town artifice.

Martha's (Debbie Doebereiner) life consists of routine actions. She awakens early every morning to fix breakfast for her father. She then picks up her co-worker, Kyle (Dustin James Ashley), and drives to work at a toy factory, where she paints faces on dolls as Kyle makes the doll heads. The two have lunch together, but there is little more to the relationship than work. Kyle is much younger than Martha and, while he seems to appreciate her help, he does not consider her his best friend as she does him.

Martha's routine is upset when a new girl begins working at the factory. Her name is Rose and when she gravitates to Kyle, the only other worker in the factory that is her age, she upsets the delicate balance. Soon Rose is imposing on Martha for rides to her second job as a house cleaner--where she bathes in clients homes and often steals anything that is not nailed down.

When Rose and Kyle begin dating, Rose further imposes on the always-helpful Martha by enlisting her to babysit her two-year-old daughter. To describe further would be to describe too much. At a slight 73 minutes, Bubble does not have much plot to describe without going to far. I can only tell you that the film becomes a true crime story in the third act.

Soderbergh directed Bubble from a script by Coleman Hough and using non-professional actors all from the small town of Belpre, Ohio, where the film was shot. With his digital camera in hand, Soderbergh crafted a small-town story that fits the film's title. These characters exist in a small-town bubble that will be recognizable to many audience members. From the trailer park to the suburbs to the toy factory, this bubble of small-town conformity is perfect until the murder bursts the calm--or seems to, temporarily.

The key to Soderbergh's directing style in Bubble is in creating a calm atmosphere that is lazy yet hypnotic. It's a real vibe movie before vibe movies became a modest sub-genre. You cannot help but be sucked in to the films elegiac pace and whisper-quiet storytelling. That quiet is only temporarily broken with the murder, and the introduction of a by-the-book police detective, played by real-life detective Decker Moody. Only then does Bubble come out of its trance like state of passive observation.

The look of the film, shot on digital video with Soderbergh acting as his own cinematographer, is reminiscent of Gus Van Zant's similarly low-budget digital feature Elephant. Not only do both films share the digital aesthetic, both films are also about small town serenity disturbed by violence. Both take a relaxed, observant view of the action in the film. Rarely does either film rise to the crescendos of the violence that take place in the film, choosing instead to merely watch and record.

This passivity plagued Elephant and made the film's story of a school shooting, similar to the Columbine massacre, less impactful. On the other hand, the passivity of Bubble is effective for Soderbergh's story. The lethargy that surrounds the characters in Bubble is part of their reality and Soderbergh enhances it by adopting it into his shooting and editing styles and in Robert Pollard's excellent acoustic guitar score.

Not surprisingly, the slow and observant pacing of Bubble did not connect with mainstream audience trained on slam-bang dramatics and MTV-paced editing that was so prominent in 2006. But hopefully today, audiences are more willing to be absorbed into this tiny world of small-town boredom and routine. Those who do will find their patience rewarded with a film that offers a trancelike trip into seemingly real lives undone by passions they did not know they had.

Bubble is no small-town-exposed feature. This is not American Beauty, which posited that all suburban homes were cover for some sort of depravity. Bubble observes a small town filled with people who have accepted their lot in life and seek only the minor comforts that small towns provide, a good bar, a decent paying job and someone you can talk to. It is when those small comforts are upended that something dramatic happens. Bubble is a fascinating, mostly forgotten, little indie feature made with the skill and precision of big budget feature made by a master director.

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