Unreliable Narrator/Film

Examples of s in include:

""There are three sides to every story: my side, your side and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently.""
 * This trope is a good way to explain away the historical inaccuracies in 300.
 * Titanic: Old Rose, if we assume all the 1912 scenes are visual representations of the story she's telling to her granddaughter and the research vessel crew. If they are meant to be this, Old Rose describes scenes and conversations for which she wasn't even present, including scenes known to be historically inaccurate ("Molly" Brown's argument with a crewman in her lifeboat, Smith and Ismay in any way discussing racing for the record, an idea that had been discarded before Titanic even launched) and all the scenes with the lifeboats and Cal's leaving the ship, and which she couldn't possibly know about since it's implied she never spoke with anyone in those scenes who survived again. Since the film as a rule averts Did Not Do the Research this could be an example of Rose making up details or coloring events (or padding the movie.) That, or she's lying about not contacting anyone (and since the real Maggie Brown was in fact a charity patron of actors in New York, it's entirely possible Rose ran into her again.)
 * The Kid Stays In the Picture. Robert Evans acknowledges that the documentary is colored by his point of view of the events in the film, with a title card stating:


 * The movie Sucker Punch embodies this trope, since . Made all the more weird because we're not quite sure who the narrator is.
 * Detour. It's implied that the main character Al Roberts is coloring events to make himself look sympathetic, and to make Vera seem more like a vicious Femme Fatale.
 * American Psycho. Patrick Bateman even lampshades: "Here is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there's no real me, only an entity, something illusory."
 * Mad Detective. Bun claims that he can visualize people's inner personalities but it's never clear whether it's an example of his madness or a legit supernatural power.
 * Snake Eyes features several flashbacks narrated by several characters in an attempt to reconstruct a crime, and every flashback replays through a continuous, first-person point of view shot. One such flashback is completely untrue, as it is narrated by the (unbeknownst) criminal.
 * Implied in Bunny and the Bull. Stephen, the main character, is retelling the story of a road trip from his perspective- vital pieces of information are left out or glossed over, not to mention the fact that he sees hallucinations in his house but doesn't realise they are not real until the end of the movie, so by consequence, neither does the audience
 * The Usual Suspects. Agent Kujan spends the course of the movie listening to Verbal tell his story, then rejects portions of it as lies.
 * The premise of Rashomon is that the story is told from four different points of view, all of which disagree, and all of which are unreliable, due to each character having a reputation to protect.
 * The ending at least gives us the truth about, but with a very different motive than what the viewer might have assumed.
 * The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari reveals in the end that the man who has been telling the story is in fact an inmate of an insane asylum, and the entire movie never happened; he just made it up based on the people around him.
 * Fight Club has the unnamed narrator who turns out to.
 * Nearly every joke in Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human relies on the alien narrator misinterpreting human behavior.
 * In Blade of Vengeance, the narrator is the female love interest. Her narratives are usually really weird. At the end of the movie, she's seen smoking opium, which explaining a lot.
 * An early example of this occurred in Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright, which opens with a flashback narrated by one of the characters who is lying to another character to obtain their help.
 * The plot of Hero consists of the same story being retold three times with major differences:
 * In the Korean horror/suspense film A Tale of Two Sisters, this trope only becomes apparent at the end. It starts out fairly normal, with two sisters returning home to their father and stepmother. It starts to get confusing, with the unexplained appearance of some wraith-like girl under the sink, various objects and people disappearing and reappearing without explanation, and all sorts of contradictory information. Eventually
 * Tracey Berkowitz of The Tracey Fragments. Maybe.
 * Big Fish has an unusual take on the Unreliable Narrator, in that
 * Also a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, as the son realizes
 * Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters: After the opening movie theater parody, the story supposedly begins millions of years ago, in 1492, at 3pm, in Egypt. Then a modern airplane flies by. It turns out this is a story Master Shake is telling Meatwad, and to make it worse, Meatwad is in the story. In fact, pretty much every character in this film is an Unreliable Narrator.
 * The Fall plays some fun games with this trope. It is a film of two levels, stories within stories - a girl in a hospital listens to stories told by a bedridden man, and we see her visualisations of the stories he tells. Trouble is, they don't share identical internal dictionaries. One great example is that he talks about an indian and his squaw, but the girl, who was friends with a Sikh, imagines a bearded subcontinental man in a turban. The Fall also features a classic example of In-Universe Creator Breakdown.
 * Memento. Lenny may be trying to report accurately, but his grasp on the real past is, to put it mildly, highly questionable.
 * Played straight, for laughs, and for drama in Forrest Gump. The naive Forrest incorrectly describes events he witnesses through his life. Notable examples: He believes that Charlie was someone the Army was looking for, opposed to the code name for the Vietcong, and Apple computers as a fruit company even though he made a fortune by investing in them.
 * Joker in The Dark Knight provides differing accounts for how exactly he got his scars, leaving you wishing he'd have more chances to terrorize victims with more colorful variations.
 * The film Secret Window, Secret Garden, (based on Stephen King's novella, which is narrated in third person) the narrator is stalked by a psychopath who accuses him of plagiarizing his book, and who attempts to frame him for several heinous crimes. In the climax, it is revealed that
 * Monster a Go-Go! has the ultimate Unreliable Narrator.
 * Bubba Ho-Tep. The stories Elvis and JFK share about themselves and how they ended up in a Texas nursing home are VERY speculative and unreliable.
 * Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman), in Little Big Man, is quite likely one of these.
 * In the original novel by Thomas Berger, the historian who transcribes Crabb's narrative expresses the opinion that most of his supposed exploits are pure malarkey. There are hints, however, that the historian may himself be something of an unreliable narrator.
 * While it didn't have an unreliable narrator itself, the 2007 Beowulf implied that the original poem was a false account of the events as told by Beowulf himself.
 * The events of The New Guy seem to strain the limits of Willing Suspension of Disbelief. At various points throughout the movie (eg: immediately after the scene with Danielle trying on swimsuits), however, the audience is reminded that we're seeing the story through the eyes of an arguably-insane convict.
 * David Leigh (David Beard) in The Last Broadcast.
 * In High Tension (originally Haute Tension), a French psychological thriller, Marie, a resourceful young woman is trying to save her best friend, Alexia, from an insane serial killer who murdered Alexia's family before kidnapping her. The twist:
 * Matthew McConaughey in Frailty.
 * The main story of Road Trip is told through the eyes of Barry, a campus tour guide who's not playing with a full deck. As such, the story has some highly improbable elements.
 * Lampshaded when he is telling the part involving the girls' locker room.
 * In Swimming Pool the novelist protagonist spends most of the movie dealing with her publisher's daughter's bad habits but, at the end, we learn
 * I Love You Phillip Morris: Steven, the voice over, is always hiding information and lying about information in the voice over.
 * In the musical film, Grease, Danny and Sandy sing about how they met each other during the summer holidays to their friends, unaware that they are both going to the same school. Sandy sings about how Danny was such a sweet guy and describes their romantic evening, whereas Danny shows off about making out with Sandy and saying that she was "good, if you know what I mean."
 * In Election, the narrator describes how a character ruined his friend's life and then states that he doesn't blame the character and that his friend had to bear the responsibility for his own actions. Nevertheless we see that he strongly dislikes the character and this informs the behaviour that sets the whole plot in motion.
 * In Maybe Baby, Lucy writes in her dairy "I remained very cool". Cut to the scene, where she's babbling away about a sequel and making a complete idiot of herself.
 * Clue uses this to make the various Multiple Endings equally plausible, as the butler doing the majority of the exposition is variously.
 * Played for laughs in Rango. The owls at the beginning say that the main character is going to die. At the end, he survives the movie and then the owls claim they were telling the truth, he will die...eventually.
 * Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Joel. A great portion of the film is told through Joel's memories of events he experienced with Clementine, but the unreliability of those memories is shown on at least two occasions. When Joel first arrives home the night of the erasure, his neighbor chats with him about Valentine's Day. This is then the first substantial memory about Clementine that gets erased. But while this event took place just a short while (maybe an hour at most) before the erasure, it is shown that Joel is already incorrectly remembering what his neighbor said to him. Other less obvious hints abound (e.g. Joel remembering childhood events while being adult in appearance). Taking the imperfection of human memory alongside whether Joel considered a given memory as enjoyable or upsetting, the audience ought to wonder if what they're viewing is what actually happened, or if Joel's memories are distorted, exaggerated, or embellished because of the passing of time and because of his emotional state at the time of the event.
 * Inverted in Braveheart where according to the film, historical inaccuracies can be explained by history itself being the unreliable narrator (having being written by the winners)
 * In the song "I Remember It Well" from Gigi, Maurice Chevalier's character claimed to remember a past meeting with Gigi's grandmother perfectly, only to be contradicted by her in every detail.
 * A probable example occurs with A Christmas Story, which is told as a likely 40-something-year-old man recalling events from when he was 9 or so. This explains such improbable details like the massive snow mountain present in the department store that would be impossible to store the other 10–11 months out of the year and the fact that their hillbilly neighbors apparently had hundreds of bloodhounds.
 * The movie Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron goes on great lengths to show that Humans Are the Real Monsters, that horses are enslaved by us, and that they should be free. Humans in the parts where the protagonist is broken in and forced to pull a train down hill are depicted in a negative manner while the parts where he's with humans that let him mostly do whatever he wants are portrayed positively. This movie is told from the point-of-view of a wild stallion who has had no contact with humans in his life, suddenly becoming captured by them.
 * Flourish stars Jennifer Morrison as Gabrielle Winters, a tutor who is brought in for questioning in the death of her sixteen-year-old student, Lucy. She tells the entire story to the police officer questioning her, and when she finishes, the police officer asks her how she could have