Literary unreliable narrators are flagged by inconsistencies in the told story. Film has a different problem: the camera appears to show us reality directly, so unreliability must be built into the image itself.

*The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari* (1920) externalizes madness in expressionist sets. *Rashomon* (1950) presents the same event from four contradictory perspectives without resolving which is true. Both force the viewer to read the image critically rather than passively.

The unreliable image is harder to pull off than the unreliable word because audiences default to trusting what they see. Which makes the reveal more disorienting.

See: [[kuleshov-effect]], [[genre-as-contract]]