The Unreliable Narrator on Screen

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The unreliable narrator is a comfortable trick in prose and a genuinely dangerous one on screen. On the page, a first-person voice can withhold, distort or invent with perfect deniability, because the reader has agreed from the first sentence to see the world only through one set of eyes. Fiction can hide inside a skull. The camera cannot. Cinema, by default, shows you things — it presents images as fact, an objective window onto events, and the audience trusts that window far more completely than they ever trust a narrator’s voice. Which is exactly why, when a film makes the image itself lie, the betrayal cuts so much deeper than any literary twist. The screen breaks a promise the page never made.

Twist - vo.rs

The Unreliable Narrator on Screen