10 Most Unreliable Movie Narrators Of All Time
2. Verbal Kint - The Usual Suspects
If cinema has taught us anything, it’s to never trust a man with a clearly made-up name. Then again, every film character technically has a made-up name…
That’s exactly the kind of thing the meek and unassuming Verbal Kint would say, as he attempts to regale customs agent Dave Kujan with an increasingly complex story of a heist gone wrong. Kint is kind of pathetic, and we feel sorry for him as he attempts to squirm his way out of trouble.
The mysterious figure of Turkish crime lord Keyser Söze looms like an elephant in the interrogation room – we’re led to believe that Söze is behind the murders and the heists, and that Kint and his associates were just cogs in a much larger machine.
But Kint is the machine. As he leaves the interrogation, his limp (caused by his supposed cerebral palsy) begins to fade, and Kujan begins to realise that Kint had been Söze all along. The flashbacks and Kint’s literal narration had all been either completely fabricated, or at least majorly doctored, in an attempt to distract Kujan from the truth: that a poor, sick yuppie like Kint could be the scourge of the criminal underworld.