You can also have an unreliable narrator in a movie--The Usual Suspects.
Whoo, yeah. Or Reservoir Dogs, which is where I first came across that trick of a whole scene that actually never happened, that's just part of a character's cover-story. Love 'em both. But then you could argue that both of these cheat, in that they conceal something important about the plot until the end - especially The Usual Suspects, where the whole film is dependent on the twist ending, which is exactly what the complaint is. And yet I'll cheerfully let them get away with it - because, at least in my lexicon, books matter but movies don't. You can be gratuitously clever in a movie, in a way that would infuriate me past bearing on the page. There are people who think I should stop trying to incorporate this attitude into my Theory of Everything, on the grounds that it's clearly just a prejudice; but it does still seem to me to make sense, in an absolutely fundamental way, that I have almost never been able to persuade anyone else to acknowledge. This is my failing, and I live with it.
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Whoo, yeah. Or Reservoir Dogs, which is where I first came across that trick of a whole scene that actually never happened, that's just part of a character's cover-story. Love 'em both. But then you could argue that both of these cheat, in that they conceal something important about the plot until the end - especially The Usual Suspects, where the whole film is dependent on the twist ending, which is exactly what the complaint is. And yet I'll cheerfully let them get away with it - because, at least in my lexicon, books matter but movies don't. You can be gratuitously clever in a movie, in a way that would infuriate me past bearing on the page. There are people who think I should stop trying to incorporate this attitude into my Theory of Everything, on the grounds that it's clearly just a prejudice; but it does still seem to me to make sense, in an absolutely fundamental way, that I have almost never been able to persuade anyone else to acknowledge. This is my failing, and I live with it.