There will be blood. Oil mogul thrives while america plunges into depression. Plainview and people like him will go on to be more influential down the line. Like prescott bush or hw bush.
12 Monkeys (1995)
Paradox (2016)
Both of these movies deal with time travel, I know that is a turn off for some people. Also in both of these movies it’s not that evil overtly wins, it’s more that protagonists fail to prevent the inciting incident from happening. With Paradox it’s not really implied until the last scene what has actually been going on.
I’ve always felt the protagonists win in 12 Monkeys. They say in the beginning that the virus outbreak can’t be prevented (it’s not that kind of time travel), but they needed a pure sample of the virus for the future to cure it. I don’t want to spoil anything more than I have, but the plane passenger at the end is relevant. They work in insurance.
Wait, I must have missed that. It’s been years… do you mind explaining further in a spoiler tag ?
This is entirely from memory from a time before every Easter egg and explanation was published on the internet, and I haven’t watched it in a few years. So I could be wrong.
But I always thought >!the woman on the plane next to the red-haired man with the pre-released, pure virus about to travel around the world, is one of the doctors from the future that was sending Bruce Willis back to locate a pure sample of the virus so they could develop a cure in the future. As she introduces herself, she says she works “in insurance.” So I always took that to mean their original goal was successful. !<
Regardless I need to watch this movie again. It is easily one of my favorites and the first movie that made me realize just how amazing an actor Brad Pitt is and that he wasn’t just another pretty face in Hollywood.
Never thought of that. We don’t see their faces do we ? aren’t they plunged in darkness ? on the few occasions we hear them talk
12 Monkeys (1995)
Paradox (2016)
Both of these movies deal with time travel, I know that is a turn off for some people.
“The Jetty” inspired 12 Monkeys, for anybody interested in watching that. It’s somewhat more experimental
If I recall it’s only like 10 minutes and either no dialog or in French. But it’s easy to get the gist of it and worth a watch. And it unlocked the thought experiment about someone witnessing their own death through time travel that Terry Gilliam expertly ran with.
No Country For Old Men.
Also from the same year, There Will Be Blood.
He drank their milkshake.
There Will Be Blood
Time Bandits
It’s a fucked up movie for damn sure.
It has one of my favorite lines though: “SLUGS! He invented slugs! They can’t hear, they can’t speak; they can’t operate machinery! I mean, are we not in the hands of a lunatic?!”
I guess the iron giant
Arlington road
Came looking for this one.
The Usual Suspects is the first one that comes to mind that isn’t horror and the villain winning by getting away. Does that fit the ‘evil wins’ concept you are looking for?
Would Reservoir Dogs also count in that case?
None of the thieves got away at the end of Reservoir Dogs.
This is not to say that “good” triumphed at the end either.
Mr Pink walked away with the diamonds before the police arrived. It’s not clear if he was caught or not but he did walk away. https://youtu.be/0GQc_SwSp_U?si=1XjXFxckgrvR_6EV
Fallen. Denzel sets a very neat trap for the demon… but not neat enough.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog as well. While the Doc may have been mostly noble and Hammer mostly awful, it ends (somewhat ambiguously) with the Doc actually turning into a villain.
I’m still disappointed we never got the Dr. Horrible sequel…
Fallen was the one I was going to add. Glad to see it here!
Gone Girl (2014). Then again, maybe that one counts as horror.
Nah, I’d call it a thriller.
In The Company Of Men
Devil’s Advocate
Interview With The Vampire
Se7en
Nightcrawler
American Psycho
Arguably No Country For Old Men
A lot of documentaries e.g: Paradise Lost.
Devil’s Advocate
I’d say evil loses quite definitively in that one - although the final minute or so makes it clear the contest of wills isn’t over.
The reason why I think it wins is it becomes obvious Satan can have do-overs and he’s already falling for one of them. He hasn’t actually escaped, and Satan is still having fun at his expense.
Fight Club
That was more chaos winning than evil. Blowing up credit institutions and wiping everyone’s debt is far from evil in most people’s eyes.
Blowing up buildings with people inside them is evil.
From what I remember there were no people inside
It’s a point raised in the movie. There were no people in the buildings because the bombings were done at night and the only people that would be in the buildings were a part of the group and knew to be out of them.
Law abiding citizen
Cabin in the woods
Glad to see Law Abiding Citizen listed, I hate the ending with a passion.
Many people do, but the whole point of the movie was that the prosecution didn’t go far enough to stop the original perpetrators. The whole point of the ending was that the entire law enforcement system came together to try to determine what it would take to stop one person, and when he tried to stop that he signed his own death warrant.
I’d argue that the whole damn system was either corrupt or broken beyond repair. The fact that they “won” in the end and got to simply go on with their lives is pretty much evil winning out.
It would also have been a much more interesting story if they let Clyde win or escalated the havoc he unleashed even further. But it seems they ran out of ideas and or budget by the time they started wrapping up the final act. So that’s a second time evil wins again.
I love Cabin in the Woods, but it arguably falls under horror.
I know, but I didn’t feel like it’s horror in the spirit of the question. OP would need to weigh in.
