Movies with unreliable narrators, from Caligari to Gone Girl

movies with unreliable narrators: what counts as an unreliable narrator

An unreliable narrator is a storyteller whose account the audience cannot take at face value. In film that can be a voiceover, a character recounting events, or a camera that shows us one person's distorted view. The films below appear repeatedly on published lists of the form, and each makes the narrator's unreliability central to the story.

Early examples, 1920 to 1950

The device is almost as old as cinema.

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920): Robert Wiene's German Expressionist classic is framed as a story told by a young man about a sinister showman. Its painted, crooked sets make sense once you consider who is telling the tale, and later films such as Shutter Island have been compared to it.
• Rashomon (1950): Akira Kurosawa shows one crime told four ways by four witnesses, each version flattering the teller. It gave its name to the Rashomon effect, where different narrators give conflicting accounts of the same events.
• Stage Fright (1950): Alfred Hitchcock opens with a flashback that turns out not to be what it seems, a choice that drew criticism at the time and is now studied as an early lying flashback.

The 1990s and 2000s

The device became a favourite of thrillers.

• The Usual Suspects (1995): almost the whole film is a story told by Verbal Kint to a customs agent, pieced together, as the ending shows, from what he can see around him.
• Fight Club (1999): Edward Norton's narrator talks us through his friendship with Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, and his voiceover hides more than it shares.
• American Psycho (2000): Mary Harron's satire follows a Wall Street banker who narrates violent acts in the same tone he uses for business cards, leaving it open how much happened.
• Memento (2000): a man with no short-term memory narrates a revenge hunt from notes and tattoos. He cannot trust his own account, so neither can we.
• A Beautiful Mind (2001): Ron Howard's film about mathematician John Nash puts the audience inside Nash's perception, so we share his view until the film shows us otherwise.

Recent examples

Later films use the technique in thrillers and literary adaptations.

• Shutter Island (2010): Martin Scorsese's marshal investigates a missing patient at an asylum, and the film is told so closely from his point of view that the island becomes as uncertain as he is.
• Life of Pi (2012): Ang Lee's adaptation is a survival story told by its hero years later, and the ending asks which version of his story you prefer.
• Gone Girl (2014): David Fincher splits the narration between a husband and his missing wife's diary, and both accounts are shaped to persuade.

Why unreliable narrators work on screen

Film tends to make us believe what we see. An unreliable narrator turns that habit against us, because the images seem objective even when they come from one person's head. That is why the best of these films reward a second watch: the clues were always in the frame.

If you want a starting point, pair Rashomon with Gone Girl to see two very different ways of handing the story to people who cannot be trusted.

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