When watching a movie, the viewer sees events unfold through the eyes of a primary narrator. But sometimes, the one closest to the story might be the worst candidate to put our trust in. The unreliable narrator comes in a variety of forms. In some cases, they might have a distorted perception of reality, therefore passing these false beliefs on to the audience. Or they could just be straight up lying to us for about three quarters of the runtime. While such a blow to the face would naturally be jarring to the audience, there’s a certain element of intrigue that accompanies a story with a misleading narrator. The unexpected turnaround, if executed properly, satisfies rather than upsets the crowd. Here are 6 movies that perfect the art of the unreliable narrator.
Memento (2000)
One of Christopher Nolan’s earliest works, this nearly three-decade-old psychological thriller tops the charts when it comes to unreliable narrators. The protagonist is Leonard Shelby, an insurance investigator who gets injured in a break-in, leaving him with anterograde amnesia, an inability to form new long-term memories. With notes, photos and tattoos as aid, he decides to hunt down the attacker responsible for his wife’s death and his current condition.
The movie plays out as a sequence of time blocks unfolding in reverse, mirroring how Leonard actually witnesses these events. As we retrace his steps, it dawns on us how easily a man who has no trouble forgetting things can rewrite his own memory. What we know isn’t so far from the truth, nor is it entirely true. We’ve simply been following a narrator who would reinvent the story to keep himself going, and everything comes full circle once we’re back at the beginning.
Fight Club (1999)
The movie is based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name and directed by David Fincher. In it, an insomniac corporate worker and an unhinged soap salesman create an underground fight club that in no time pervades the city and explodes into an anti-capitalist crime group. But there’s a catch.
Right from the start, we’re thrown into the head of the disturbed nameless narrator (played by Edward Norton), seeing what he sees and following the story with his thoughts as an overlay. The catch here is that all this time, our narrator has developed a split identity and invented an alter ego for himself, manifested as the dauntless friend we’ve been seeing on screen, whom we now realise does not exist at all. The final act is mostly viewers connecting the dots alongside the equally clueless narrator, and for an ending so dark, it’s quite a blast. Not necessarily a clean finish, no moral of the story, but it leaves you with a whole lot to think about.
Big Fish (2003)
This is an especially heartwarming story about a man on his deathbed, who doesn’t need to spend the remainder of his days recounting his life because he’s already spent an entire lifetime doing just that. Edward Bloom is shown to be a truly passionate storyteller, a quality his son, William, once admired but later grows to loathe, unsure if all those far-fetched stories were facts or fiction.
We watch flashbacks of Edward narrating his extraordinary adventures while doubtful, like William, of how true they are. As we feared, his stories are not all true, but one would be surprised at how much truth there is to them. The lesson we learn alongside William is that the storyteller embellishes his memories when recounting them to others, but the essence of truth in the stories isn’t lost just because he’s made them slightly more enjoyable.
A Beautiful Mind (2001)
A Beautiful Mind chronicles the life of the Nobel laureate mathematician, John Nash. We follow Nash as a socially awkward graduate student in search of an original idea, a successful mathematician finding love, then as a man losing control of his own mind.
While the biopic may be ridden with cinematic inflation, it’s a rattlingly engaging experience in itself. Suffering from schizophrenia, Nash invents non-existent people and encounters in his head, completely unaware that they are only a figment of his imagination. He doesn’t know it, and neither does the audience. But even in the moment of revelation, the story doesn’t cease to be hopeful.
Gone Girl (2014)
David Fincher seems to have a real knack for unreliable narrators as this is the second movie on this list directed by him. Gone Girl follows Nick Dunne, a man who finds himself becoming the prime police suspect after his wife goes missing on their wedding anniversary.
If in the first couple of minutes, you think this is going to be an average domestic thriller, then you would be jumping the gun there. The plot recontextualises itself when it’s revealed that the wife has all along been setting up a stage for her own death. And yet again as we realise that much of what the couple have been posing to be is merely keeping up appearances, believing that if they play the part well enough, the lie could hardly be told apart from reality.
Shutter Island (2010)
US Marshal Edward Daniels and his partner venture to a remote island, home to a high-profile psychiatric facility for criminals, to investigate the case of a missing patient. Convinced that the facility is conducting illegal experiments on their patients, Edward is determined to expose them, though he has his own inner demons to battle.
The movie is filled to the brim with red herrings that completely distract the audience from the major plot twist. We get so busy suspecting the institution that we barely ever stop to question the narrator himself. Not until the bombshell is finally dropped on us, that to rid himself of guilt and grief, Edward has conjured a fictitious identity, and that the missing patient has been standing before us all along.
