Mad
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Cricket Brown
Genres: drama
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
A woman caught between substance use and unraveling mental health drifts through NYC, fighting paranoia and hallucinations as she tries to make contact with the people still in her life. The city becomes a hostile mirror.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most NYC fringe portraits are aestheticized self-pity. This one keeps the camera at face level and lets Divine do the bleeding — refreshingly unpretty.
Cricket Brown directs paranoia as POV drift rather than thriller mechanics — Heaven Knows What with quieter edges, the city as hostile mirror. That's the right move for the material.
Cricket Brown directing herself adjacent — point-of-view drift over thriller mechanics is the right vibe-over-plot move for the substance-use/paranoia subject. NYC dissociation films are a crowded room, but the texts-to-Mary-the-bartender specificity and the dance-audition-pills sequence sound lived-in.
Reviews
She delivers a compelling performance playing a character on the fringe.