10 Most Unreliable Movie Narrators Of All Time

Rashomon didn’t just give us one unreliable narrator, it gave us four.

The film depicts a woodcutter and a priest, as they relay the testimonies of three key witnesses to a murder. Having found the body of a samurai in the woods, the two men attempt to make sense of the events that took place by going over each eyewitness account, calling into question the very idea of an objective truth.

The first account, that of the bandit Tajōmaru, states that Tajōmaru killed the samurai in a duel, after he raped the samurai’s wife. It’s hardly a statement of total innocence, but it serves to get the bandit off the hook on the basis that both men agreed to the duel.

The wife tells a different story, wherein she faints after being raped, and awakens to find her husband dead, with a knife embedded in his chest. Conversely, the dead samurai himself explains (by way of a medium) that he committed suicide because his wife left him for Tajōmaru.

Each account is told with the same level of validity and sincerity, and the film never truly divulges which one was ‘true’ (a phenomenon now known as the ‘Rashomon effect’), nor whether the woodcutter’s story was even accurate to begin with.