Unreliable Narration and Audience Inference in Film: An Attribution-Sensitive Framework

Abstract

Unreliable narration in film raises a problem that cannot be resolved by identifying deceptive characters alone: viewers must decide whose perspective a representation expresses and how strongly it warrants belief about the fictional world. This article critically reviews cognitive narratology, pragmatic accounts of fictional communication, and multimodal approaches to film interpretation. The review uses purposive selection of foundational and directly relevant scholarship, including recent work on cinematic perspective and voice-over narration. It compares approaches through four questions concerning the location of unreliability, the status of audiovisual evidence, the mechanisms of inference, and the grounds for revising an interpretation. The synthesis identifies a recurring explanatory gap between describing narrative cues and demonstrating their effects on actual audiences. It proposes an attribution-sensitive framework that connects cue availability, source attribution, provisional commitment, and retrospective revision, while distinguishing factual correction from interpretive and ethical disagreement. Illustrations drawn from scholarship on English-language films clarify why restricted knowledge, subjective imagery, and narratorial deception require different explanations. The article argues that cognitive and pragmatic approaches become most productive when integrated around specific inferential problems rather than treated as interchangeable theories. The resulting framework provides a transparent basis for close analysis and generates testable propositions for future reception research without presenting textual interpretation as empirical evidence of audience response.