The unreliable narrator in movies
An unreliable narrator in movies is almost never a narrator at all: it is a set of six substitute techniques a director uses to produce the same effect a novelist gets from a single untrustworthy voice. Film cannot simply hand a character the microphone and let the audience be misled for 2 hours, because the camera keeps reporting the whole time. So the device is not transferred in adaptation. It is dismantled and rebuilt out of different parts, and the parts are structural: falsified images, withheld points of view, reordered time, and framings that collapse. Knowing which part a film is using is the quickest way to see what the novel underneath it originally did.
Why a camera cannot simply carry a lying narrator
A camera cannot carry a lying narrator because a camera is an independent witness, and the novel's version of the device depends on there being no such witness. In prose the narrating voice is the reader's entire supply of information. On screen the voice is one track among three, competing with the image and the sound design, and audiences trust the image first. Play a voiceover claiming one thing over a shot showing another and viewers do not conclude that the speaker is self-deceived. They conclude that the film has made an error, or is about to reveal a twist, and either way the delicate literary effect is gone.
Two further mismatches make it worse. Voiceover is intermittent, whereas prose narration is continuous, so a film narrator disappears for 10 or 20 minutes at a stretch and cannot maintain a false account across the gaps. And film has no unmarked omission. A novelist can leave a sentence out and no reader will notice the absence, while a cut in a film is visible as a cut. This reference sorts unreliable narrators into 4 kinds by what the narrator is doing to the reader: the mistaken, who reports honestly and interprets wrongly; the naive, who reports accurately with no frame to read it by; the evasive, who knows and steers the account away from it; and the lying, who builds a false account on purpose for an audience. The evasive kind is the hardest of the 4 to move to the screen, because a narrator steering around a subject leaves nothing for a camera to photograph.
The six techniques that replace the device on screen
Six techniques do the replacing, and nearly every unreliable film is running one or more of them.
- Disqualify the voiceover. Let a narrator talk over the film and then establish that the narration was assembled for somebody, as The Usual Suspects (1995) does with an interrogation, and as Gone Girl (2014) does with diary entries composed as evidence.
- Falsify the flashback. Show a past event as fact and later contradict the image itself. Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) is the standing example, and it drew objections at the time for breaking an unwritten contract that the picture does not lie.
- Withhold the point of view. Present a subjective perspective as neutral coverage, so the audience takes one character's experience for the world, as in The Sixth Sense (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Shutter Island (2010).
- Reorder the time. Deny the audience the same information the protagonist is missing by rearranging the sequence, which is what Memento (2000) does by running its main strand backwards.
- Replay the event. Show one incident several times from several accounts that do not reconcile. Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), adapted from short fiction by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, established the pattern so firmly that the effect is now named after it.
- Collapse the frame. Reveal at the end that the whole film has been someone's account, as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) does, or offer two irreconcilable accounts and decline to choose, as Life of Pi (2012) does.
The adaptations that rebuilt the device, and the founding case that could not
Adaptations that rebuilt the device did it by substituting a technique for the voice rather than trying to keep the voice. David Fincher's Gone Girl keeps Flynn's alternating structure but converts her fabricated diary into voiceover the film later disqualifies, which is technique 1 replacing a written document. Joe Wright's Atonement (2007) rebuilds McEwan's final reversal as a filmed interview and a replayed scene, which is techniques 5 and 6 together. Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, from Dennis Lehane's 2003 novel, uses technique 3 throughout: nothing in the coverage announces whose perspective it is until the perspective becomes the subject.
Liz Jensen's 2004 novel gives the reader a boy of 9 narrating from inside a coma, continuously and in his own idiom, with only the doctor treating him offering an outside account. There is no way to check him.
Alexandre Aja's 2016 version, from a screenplay by Max Minghella, keeps the boy's voice as voiceover, but the camera stands in the room with the adults for most of the running time, so the audience is checking him almost continuously.
The 2016 film is a useful failure case rather than a bad film. It chose technique 1 without disqualifying the voice, and technique 3 for the adult strand, which leaves two systems running at once. The novel's boy is the naive kind of narrator, honest and unequipped, and naive narrators need the audience to be trapped in the limitation. Give viewers a camera that can leave the bedside and the trap opens. What remains is a mystery about adults, which is a legitimate film and a different one.
Reliable against unreliable, as a viewer meets them
Reliable and unreliable narration look identical to a viewer for most of a film, which is the practical difference from reading. A reliable film narrator, of the kind heard in a documentary or in a straightforward literary adaptation, is treated as the film's own voice and is never audited. An unreliable one is only recognised retrospectively, at the moment the film supplies the correction, and everything before that moment was watched in good faith. Novels distribute their tells across hundreds of pages so an attentive reader can catch on early. Films tend to concentrate the correction into a single sequence, usually in the last 15 minutes, because a slow leak on screen simply reads as an incoherent film.
Where the long form has an advantage the feature does not
The long form has the advantage of time, and television has used it more inventively than cinema has. A series can spend a full episode inside one character's account and the next episode inside a contradicting one, which is a version of technique 5 stretched across hours instead of minutes. The Affair (2014) built its whole structure that way, alternating perspectives that disagree about dialogue, clothing and who approached whom. A feature running 100 minutes cannot afford to give a discredited account that much room. This is one reason novels built on a sustained unreliable voice are increasingly optioned as series rather than films, and it points at the underlying problem: the device needs duration, and duration is exactly what adaptation to a feature takes away.