50 Unreliable Movie Narrators

A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003)

The Unreliable Narrator: Su-mi (Im Soo-jung), who returns home with her sister Su-yeon (Moon Geun Young) to live with her father and stepmother.

Biggest Whopper: Su-yeon's been dead for ages, and there is no stepmother – Su-mi has been dressing up and playing both of them for the entirety of the movie.

Creepy.

The Sixth Sense (1999)

The Unreliable Narrator: Child psychologist Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), who gets shot at the beginning of the film but presumably makes a miraculous recovery by the time he visits with ghost-bothered Cole (Haley Joel Osment).

Biggest Whopper: Alright, Crowe didn't survive, and he is the one of the ghosts bothering Cole. Whoops.

Election (1999)

The Unreliable Narrator: Both Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), a bothered and beleaguered high school teacher, and snippy social climber Flick (Reese Witherspoon), who are at war in the school corridors.

Biggest Whopper: There are almost too many to keep up, though Flick's chirpy “Senior year was very productive for me” belies the fact that she cheated, bullied and lied her way to the top.

Stage Fright (1950)

The Unreliable Narrator: Actor Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd).

He's been having an affair with Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich), who may or may not have just killed her husband...

Biggest Whopper: Turns out that opening narration was a fake flashback, meaning we've been duped from the start.

Rotter.

Taxi Driver (1976)

The Unreliable Narrator: Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), an ex-US Marine who becomes a cab driver in New York after being honourably discharged.

Lonely and adrift, Bickle searches for meaning.

Biggest Whopper:
Bickle constantly interrupts his own narration and we're never sure what is true and what isn't.

Memento (2000)

The Unreliable Narrator: Lenny (Guy Pearce), whose memory problems (he suffers from anterograde amnesia) make him massively unreliable.

Biggest Whopper: Lying to himself in an elaborate scheme that has him perpetually chasing the man he thinks raped and killed his wife.

John G, though, doesn't actually exist...

The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (1920)

The Unreliable Narrator: Francis (Friedrich Fehér), who tells the story of Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), a carnival worker who displays his somnambulist companion at a carnival.

Biggest Whopper: The entire movie is an elaborate lie dreamt up by Francis, who's actually more than a little bit mental. Youch.

Rashomon (1950)

The Unreliable Narrator: A victim of rape, her husband, and the rapist himself all give their own differing accounts of the attack, all of them contradicting one another.

Biggest Whopper:
Everything said by the samurai, according to the woodcutter, is a lie.

Bad samurai.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

The Unreliable Narrator: Roger 'Verbal' Kint (Kevin Spacey), a con artist who suffers from cerebral palsy.

The entire film revolves around him telling a story about a job gone wrong that resulted in numerous bloody deaths.

Biggest Whopper: Turns out that Kint himself is the elusive Keiser Soze, the brain behind the purposefully-botched job...

Fight Club (1999)

The Unreliable Narrator: Referred to merely as The Narrator (Edward Norton), this guy appears to have all the facts straight.

That is, until Brad Pitt's six-pack-toting wild card Tyler enters frame and starts confusing everything.

Biggest Whopper: In one of cinema's finest twists (SPOILERS!), The Narrator and Tyler are one and the same person.

Josh Winning has worn a lot of hats over the years. Contributing Editor at Total Film, writer for SFX, and senior film writer at the Radio Times. Josh has also penned a novel about mysteries and monsters, is the co-host of a movie podcast, and has a library of pretty phenomenal stories from visiting some of the biggest TV and film sets in the world. He would also like you to know that he "lives for cat videos..." Don't we all, Josh. Don't we all.  

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