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Content Warning: The following article contains spoilers for all the movies listed, as well as discussions of suicide and sexual assault.
An unreliable narrator is a narrator who can’t be entirely trusted to tell the truth. Sometimes the narrator doesn’t even know whether they’re unreliable — they may have delusions or memory loss, limited or simplistic worldview, or recall events out of order. Unreliable narration allows directors to break away from conventional plotting and urges viewers to think critically about what’s being reported.
Film buffs who love a challenge and come prepared for twists and surprises will find these films to be satisfying. Like any good movie with an unreliable narrator, they require repeat viewings, so fans can search for missed clues and trace a more direct line to the ultimate reveal. IMDb has made it easier to determine which movies audiences should check out first.
‘Stage Fright’ (1950) – 7.0
Aspiring actress Eve (Jane Wyman) is interrupted at rehearsal by fellow actor and secret crush Jonathan (Richard Todd), who confesses to an affair with stage actress Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich). He relays that she’s just killed her husband in an argument, as evidenced by her bloodstained dress. Jonathan went to her house to find a clean dress but, seeing the body, tried to stage a burglary gone wrong and was caught by Charlotte’s maid. He’s now wanted for murder, but Eve vows not only to hide him, but to clear his name.
Unreliable narration is happening twofold in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright. First, all major characters are actors. They lie professionally and inhabit characters. Second, Stage Fright broke an important cinematic convention, angering audiences. Its thirteen-minute-long flashback establishing the murder mystery is itself a lie. Moviegoers were so discombobulated they felt cheated, but Stage Fright’s daring lie opened the door for other directors to push the bounds of truth, including Hitchcock himself in his best movies like Vertigo and Psycho.
‘The Great Gatsby’ (2013) – 7.2
The Great Gatsby follows Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), a self-made man of incredible success, has since spared no expense in rebranding himself a respectable gentleman, all in the name of his love for Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan). Daisy impatiently married Tom (Joel Edgerton), a wealthy social elite from old money, having given up waiting on penniless Gatsby to make good. Now, Gatsby has everything but the girl, and he’ll do anything to win her back.
Gatsby’s neighbor, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), is the film’s narrator. Nick is not a member of the wealthy elite. He admires Gatsby, and his memories are tinted with his esteem. Had the story been told from someone else’s point of view, Gatsby might have seemed like a hopeless romantic: dangerous, even. But the story is filtered through Nick; his narration must be compared to his words and actions. Director Baz Luhrmann subtly reminds viewers that much like Gatsby, Nick is flawed.
‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ (2011) – 7.5
Eva (Tilda Swinton) is a reluctant mother who fails to bond with her newborn baby in We Need To Talk About Kevin. Visiting Kevin (Ezra Miller) grown up and in prison years later, the film moves through a series of flashbacks of his difficult childhood. Kevin was never an easy child, and Eva was never a natural mother. She struggled to love her odd little boy, but as he grew, his strange behavior became increasingly dangerous.
Director Lynne Ramsay brilliantly tells the story from different perspectives, never quite taking sides. Eva is often resentful of her son, and sometimes neglectful. Kevin seems to target his mother and willfully pushes her buttons. His father (John C. Reilly), more loving, fails to notice how difficult the mother-son relationship is, and refuses to acknowledge Eva’s feelings. This creates deliberate cloudiness leaving viewers unsure where to place guilt: this narration isn’t just unreliable, it’s unable or unwilling to pass judgment. It’s asking the viewer: nature or nurture?
‘I, Tonya’ (2017) – 7.5
Although gifted and athletic, Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) was too brash to fit into the privileged world of elite figure skating. Despite her skill, judges viewed her less favorably than the graceful and elegant Nancy Kerrigan, which culminated in a vicious attack on Kerrigan just before the 1994 Olympics. The film, as much true crime as sports flick, recounts Tonya’s life story from her first pair of skates to her lifetime ban from the sport, told by several key people in her life.
Viewers are quick to notice that there is very little about “the incident” that the key people in her life agree on. Her abusive mother Lavona (Allison Janney), her longest-lasting coach (Julianne Nicholson), her violent ex-husband Jeff (Sebastian Stan), and her brutish bodyguard (Paul Walter Hauser) all tell the same story while disagreeing on basic facts, based on wildly contradictory statements given by the real people represented in the film. I, Tonya challenges viewers to meditate on “truth”—whether there’s ever really one universal truth, or if every story truly has two (or more) sides.
‘Atonement’ (2007) – 7.8
Thirteen-year-old Briony (Saoirse Ronan) may seem precocious, but when she sees her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) flirting with Robbie (James McAvoy), she draws some uninformed conclusions. Later, when cousin Lola (Juno Temple) is raped, Briony accuses Robbie, sure she saw him commit the crime. But whether true or not, her accusations irrevocably change the course of several lives in Atonement.
Often considered alongside director Joe Wright‘s best movies, the film shows Robbie exchanging his prison sentence for active duty in WWII, and Cecilia, estranged from her family, working as a nurse. They reunite briefly, pledging their love before he’s shipped off to France. As Briony matures, she recognizes their embrace for what it was, and the horror of her accusation dawns. She resolves to fix things, but over fifty years later, an elderly Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) finally confesses to the viewer the true extent of her lie and its repercussions.
‘The Perks Of Being A Wallflower’ (2012) – 8.0
Nervous about his first day of school in the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie (Logan Lerman) nevertheless makes fast friends with seniors Sam (Emma Watson) and Patrick (Ezra Miller) and is welcomed into their social circle. Everyone is dealing with their own stress and relationship woes, but Charlie’s burden, including the recent death of his aunt, his friend’s suicide, and his own secret crush on Sam, seems heavier than most.
It isn’t until the film’s end that Charlie, and viewers, learn that the protagonist has been repressing traumatic memories. Through this new lens, fans can better appreciate Charlie’s tendency to withdraw and self-sabotage. The repressed memories shed new light on Charlie’s character and fill in gaps nobody knew were there.
‘Big Fish’ (2003) – 8.0
Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) returns home to reconnect with his father Edward (Albert Finney) as he lay dying. Will and Edward have been estranged because of Edward’s propensity for tall tales, but realizing this is his last chance to know the man behind the stories, Will gives him a last chance to tell the truth. But not only does Edward remain faithful to his stories, he retells his favorite ones, including how he (Ewan McGregor) first met Will’s mother, and how he saw his own death in a witch’s glass eye.
Big Fish is Tim Burton’s joyous celebration of life, filled with colorful characters, epic stories, and magical realism. Edward is an unapologetic embellisher of truth. Will’s job, and the viewers’, is to parse those whoppers for the kernels of truth inside them.
‘Room’ (2015) – 8.1
Jack is a happy 5-year-old, well-loved by Ma (Brie Larson) and comfortable in his 10×10 universe, which they call Room. Jack (Jacob Tremblay) doesn’t realize Ma’s been held captive and sexually assaulted for the past seven years. Yet with Jack, she sings, plays games, and tells stories. Room is all Jack knows, and Ma has made it comfortable for him.
It’s jarring for the audience to see A24’s Room from both her eyes and his, but it allows for a deeper appreciation of how two people can experience the same situation very differently. Once Jack and Ma escape, their viewpoints diverge even further, with Jack’s world expanding while Ma’s shatters due to depression and PTSD. Both Jack’s age and his limited life experience make him a naive narrator with a truly unique point of view.
‘A Beautiful Mind’ (2001) – 8.2
In A Beautiful Mind, John Nash (Russell Crowe), a brilliant mathematician recruited by agent Parcher (Ed Harris) to the U.S. Department of Defense to crack a complex enemy encryption. He cracks it easily and is assigned further decoding work. But the deeper he gets, the more paranoid he becomes, his erratic behavior eventually prompts his wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly) to commit him to a psychiatric facility where delusions are discovered, and a mental health condition is diagnosed.
For the first half of this unconventional biopic, Nash doesn’t realize he’s seeing hallucinations, so the viewer takes him at his word just as he trusts reality is as he experiences it. When Nash is finally convinced of his condition, he starts to question everything, turning his world upside down. The audience experiences the shift with him, shocked by his losses and shaken by his lack of confidence. It’s a brilliant portrayal of a silent struggle.
‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004) – 8.3
Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) are drawn to each other despite obvious differences in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Their whirlwind romance belies the fact that they’re actually former lovers who broke up and had their memories of the relationship erased in a medical procedure. Joel had second thoughts during the procedure, and viewers see flashbacks of their relationship while the unconscious protagonist tries to hide those memories from the techs charged with erasing them.
Erased memories and compromised timelines make the narration of this film extremely unreliable, which is either beside the point, or exactly the point. Either way, neither of them has all the facts while falling in love. Falling out of love can be even worse, but like so many protagonists before him, Joel learns that there is something worse than heartbreak: the empty void where love never was.
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