10 Genius Movie Moments When Unreliable Narrators Changed EVERYTHING
Who knew being lied to could be so entertaining?
Movies truly are magic. It's said a lot, but they are. There is literally no limit to storytelling when the ones bringing said story to an audience can flex their creative muscles. There is no right or wrong, allowing for an enthralling and encapsulating experience.
When it comes to the cinema, stories have always been brought to the screen creatively. One such technique is to tell the story from the perspective of one single character, who narrates the events for the audience. This could be literally through voiceovers, through scenes being shot from their point of view or their memory, or both.
This presents an opportunity, because almost automatically anyone watching has no choice but to trust the events unfolding before them, as it's all they have to go on. But there is nothing in the rule book to say that these narrators need to be reliable. Often the things told to us or shown to us in movies are completely untrue within the context of the story itself.
Typically, no one likes being lied to, but the reveal of an unreliable narrator, that one penny-dropping moment, can be mind-blowing. If done well, it even has the power to lift a good film to a great film, and a great film to an instant classic.
10. What Else Was In Arthur's Head? – Joker
As Joker focused on the internal battle within the titular character like no other big-screen iteration has before, audiences were given a deeper look into the horrors that led to him becoming a serial killing criminal cult leader.
Towards the start of the movie, when Arthur (Joaquin Phoenix) watches The Murray Franklin Show with his mom (Frances Conroy), and imagines himself as a guest, it's clear that he is prone to dreaming. Even after the audience starts laughing at his jokes at the comedy club where he bombs, alarm bells don't go off until after he kills his mother. From there, he heads straight to Sophie's apartment. Sophie (Zazie Beetz) lived in the same building as Arthur, and the two struck a quick romance after bonding over the state of where they lived. However, this was just another figment within Arthur's head, though it wasn't revealed straight away.
Maybe this was Arthur's way of trying to cope with his life falling to pieces around him, but when she found him in her living room and asked if he was Arthur from down the hall, reality kicked in. Though it was never real, losing Sophie just added fuel to the fire that led to Arthur committing murder on live TV with nothing left to lose.
From here, looking back there is really no way of knowing what else was just in his head, and this stretches into Joker: Folie à Deux as well. What other aspects of the story happened only in Arthur's head that simply weren't ever revealed to be fiction?