rise-and-fall tragedy

Films whose narrative architecture is structured as a classical Aristotelian arc — a protagonist's ascent to power, mastery, or status followed by inevitable, often catastrophic collapse — where audiences experience the trajectory itself as the primary dramatic engine, watching hubris, obsession, or appetite build the very mechanism of destruction. The rise must be genuinely exhilarating or seductive before the fall arrives, so that the audience has been complicit in wanting what destroys the protagonist. Distinct from slow-unraveling (which begins already in deterioration or stasis and tracks psychological/situational decline without a preceding ascent that the film dramatizes as achievement) by requiring the full arc — ascent and fall — as the structural spine; distinct from investigation-spiral (which is organized around inquiry drawing characters into danger) by being specifically about a protagonist's own accumulation and subsequent ruin rather than an external mystery that consumes them.