March Madness: Madness Overtakes Our Bracket
This March, if you have been following along on our Instagram, we have been doing a March Movie Madness bracket. Our criteria here are not based on which are the “better” movies but which are better at selling the madness and / or giving you the feeling that you are losing it.
To seed our bracket, we started with the following 32 movies that we narrowed to 16:
House That Jack Built beat Maniac
mother! beat Pan’s Labyrinth
Black Swan beat PI
Melancholia beat Shutter Island
Fight Club beat American Psycho
The Shining beat Psycho
Smile 2 beat 12 Monkeys
Evil Dead beat The Devil’s Candy
Requiem for a Dream beat Natural Born Killers
The Substance beat The Fly
Dark City beat Brazil
Mad God beat Event Horizon
The Lighthouse beat Being John Malkovich
The Endless beat The Mouth of Madness
Vanilla Sky beat Jacob’s Ladder
Mandy beat Swiss Army Man
In round 2, the competition heated up and we lost a couple of surprises. Let’s look a bit more at who we lost:
The depraved “artist” of House that Jack Built lost to mother!
Melancholia, with its stunningly accurate portrayal of depression, lost out to Black Swan’s study of the line between genius and madness.
Fight Club’s inner struggle lost to The Shining, a favorite to win it all.
Evil Dead is the better movie but Smile 2 won for driving us mad.
Requiem for a Dream dropped to the now Oscar-winning Substance.
Dark City couldn’t compete with the unrelenting Mad God.
Lovecraftian vibes battled as The Endless dropped to The Lighthouse.
Finally, Cage took down Cruise as Vanilla Sky dropped to Mandy.
This gets us to our Elite Eight. But let’s get this down to our Final Four we will discuss on the podcast. First up:
mother! vs Black Swan. In this match up, mother! gives us a great rollercoaster of a nightmare but Black Swan ultimately wins out with with its dream-like blending of reality and madness.
The Shining vs Smile 2. Smile 2 puts up a good fight with its unreliable narrator but ultimately, The Shining’s Jack’s madness affecting both himself and the audience is hard to top.
The Substance vs Mad God. If you want to peer into the mind of a madman, watch the Mad God. However, The Substance wins out for dragging us along on someone’s path to detachment from reality.
The Lighthouse vs Mandy. as a character study of two men pushing each other to the brink and beyond vs one man’s journey for revenge. Madness wins as The Lighthouse takes this battle.
We are down to Black Swan vs The Shining and The Substance vs The Lighthouse. Now let’s get to our winner:
Black Swan vs The Shining. In a stunning upset, Black Swan beats The Shining. Yes, The Shining is a classic but we are clearly outside of Jack’s madness and subjected to its horror. In Black Swan, however, as Nina loses her mind, so do we until we aren’t sure what is real and what is in her head.
The Substance vs The Lighthouse. Much like our other Final Four match up, we come down to our experience during the film and The Substance and The Lighthouse go toe to toe on letting the madness sink in. The Substance wins by a hair here, though, as The Lighthouse pulls back at the end for us to see the effects, The Substance fully devolves into a pure primal scream.
This brings us to our final two: The Substance vs Black Swan.
Both movies are character studies that lead us down the path of madness as their protagonists, if you can call them that, let their obsessions take over. Both are sure to stand the test of time as great films that aren’t for everyone. But, we have to pick a winner. Ultimately, Black Swan feels like a bigger movie than The Substance, fully immersing us into a realistic depiction of Nina’s world, setting up a full cast of characters that play a part in her descent, there is a lot going on here. On top of that, Nina’s journey is a study of the thin line between genius and madness and the pursuit of perfection.
Black Swan is our winner! If you disagree, don’t blame us, we just spent a month giving into madness!
