Unreliable narrator

In practice

An unreliable narrator is a storyteller whose account the audience cannot take at face value, because they lie, misremember, misunderstand or leave out what matters. The pleasure for the audience is the gap between what they are told and what they can see, and the moment the story makes that gap impossible to ignore.

Novels manage this through a first-person voice. A screenplay has to do it with the camera, which shows what it shows. So film has three main tools: a voice-over that says one thing while the images show another, a flashback that depicts a character's account as if it were true, and a point of view held so tightly to one character that their misreading becomes ours.

The difference between a twist that lands and one that feels like a cheat is planting. Leave contradictions in plain sight: a detail the narrator skips, a reaction that does not fit their version, a line another character disputes. On a second viewing the truth should have been visible all along.

An unreliable narrator in a scene

The narration and the picture contradict each other, and the script lets them. From here on, the audience watches every scene of Danny's account asking what else he is leaving out. Small contradictions planted this early mean the final reveal reframes the story instead of overruling it.

Where the idea comes from

The critic Wayne C. Booth named it in The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961: a narrator is unreliable when what they tell us does not match the values and facts of the work as a whole. The idea is older than the name. Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) caused a scandal when its helpful narrator turned out to be the killer.

Later novels made the narrator's blind spots the point. The butler who narrates Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day never quite admits what his loyalty cost him, and the reader sees it long before he does. That gentler kind, the narrator who is wrong about himself, is often the most moving.

Kinds of unreliable narrator

The liar knows the truth and hides it, so the clues are slips and things the narrator avoids. The mistaken or naive narrator means every word but misunderstands, so the clues are what other characters see and the narrator does not. The impaired narrator's memory or perception fails, through illness, trauma or drugs, so the clues are breaks in the world itself.

The evasive narrator tells the truth but not all of it, and is often the hardest to play fair with, because the audience cannot spot a gap it has no reason to look for. The critic William Riggan's 1981 study sorted narrators into pícaros, madmen, naïfs, clowns and liars, which maps onto the same choice: what kind of clue will the audience have to notice?

How film does it

Rashomon (1950) tells one crime four times, through four witnesses whose accounts cannot all be true, and never settles which is right. The same year, Hitchcock's Stage Fright opened with a flashback that turned out to be a lie. Hitchcock later told François Truffaut it was a mistake, because the audience felt the film itself had deceived them rather than the character.

The Usual Suspects (1995) gives most of its story to a narrator assembling his account from whatever he can see in the room. Fight Club (1999) holds the point of view so tightly to its narrator that his delusion is the film's reality. Gone Girl (2014) uses diary voice-over that the second half of the film reveals as a performance.

Playing fair with the audience

Know the true version before you write the false one. Outline both side by side: what the narrator says happened, and what did. Every scene of the account should be built from the second column, with the first laid on top of it.

Let the camera disagree with the narrator at least once before the reveal. A line of action that does not fit, a reaction from another character, a detail held a beat too long: these are the clues a second viewing rewards. If no image in the film ever contradicted the narrator, the twist will feel like the film lying, which is the trap Hitchcock described.

Common questions