Spoiler Alert: This post discusses the endings of all three.
The Father opens as a domestic drama and gives no sign of being anything else. A daughter lets herself into her father's London flat. He has driven off another carer, and he is certain the woman stole his watch. The daughter is tired and patient, and she tells him she is moving to Paris. The flat is solid, well lit and full of the furniture of a long life, and the scene is played straight: two people in a kitchen having an argument they have clearly had before. A viewer settles in for a film about an old man's decline, watched from a safe distance.
The next scene removes the distance. The father hears a sound, goes through to the sitting room and finds a man he has never seen, who tells him calmly that this is his flat and that he has been married to Anne for ten years. Then Anne comes back from the market with a chicken for dinner, and she is a different woman. A different face, a different voice, the same name and the same concern. The film does not cut away to show us which of the two is real, and it gives no sign that anything has gone wrong with the picture. We are exactly as lost as he is, and the film intends to keep us there.
Unreliable perception has been one of the dominant devices of popular fiction for a generation, and it usually arrives as a twist. The template is nearly a century old: a narrator the reader trusts, a lie the reader does not notice, and a late chapter that exposes it. The unreliability is a lie the book eventually corrects, and the correction is the payoff. The reader turns back through the pages, sees how the trick was done, and is given firm ground to stand on. The Father belongs to a smaller and older tradition with a different commitment. The audience experiences the unreliability while it is happening and is never given the outside vantage that would settle what was real. There is no confession, no second witness, no scene played from a position the troubled mind cannot reach.
The useful word here is focalisation, Gérard Genette's term for the consciousness through which a story is perceived, as distinct from the voice that tells it. The distinction is what lets a ghost story, a horror film and a film adapted from a stage play sit on the same shelf. The Turn of the Screw has a narrator and the two films have none, but all three hold to a single unreliable focaliser from the first scene to the last, and all three refuse to let anyone else's perception in.
Henry James got there first, in 1898. The Turn of the Screw ran in Collier's Weekly from January to April of that year, and it opens on a frame: a house party at Christmas, ghost stories by the fire, and a guest called Douglas who owns a manuscript written by his sister's governess, twenty years dead. The manuscript is the rest of the book. A young woman takes a post at a country house called Bly, in sole charge of two orphaned children, Miles and Flora, and begins to see figures: a man on the tower, the same man at the dining room window, a woman in black on the far side of the lake. The housekeeper, Mrs Grose, sees none of them, and the children never admit to seeing them either.
The evidence is balanced with great care. When the governess describes the man to Mrs Grose, with his red hair, no hat and long pale face, the housekeeper recognises Peter Quint, the master's valet, who is dead and of whom the governess had never heard. That is the strongest evidence for the ghosts, and it is strong. Nearly everything else in the book is the governess's interpretation of what the children's silences mean, and she interprets quickly and without doubt. When Flora is confronted at the lake with a woman the governess can see plainly, the child sees nothing and says so, and Mrs Grose sides with the child. Edna Kenton in 1924 and Edmund Wilson in 1934 argued that the ghosts belonged to the governess, and the argument has run ever since without resolution, because James made sure it could not resolve. In the preface he wrote for the New York Edition a decade later, he called the story "an amusette to catch those not easily caught".
The governess tells everything, including the moments that make her look frantic, and her candour is never in doubt. The narrator of a twist novel knows the truth and arranges the sentences around it. James's governess has nothing to arrange. Her perception is the unreliable instrument, and it is the only instrument the book provides, which is the difference between an unreliable narrator and an unreliable focaliser. It is also why a twist novel can end with the truth told and James's cannot. She believes every word she writes.
The book's boldest decision is the one readers notice least. The frame never closes.
The party by the fire, Douglas, the listeners who asked for the story: none of them comes back. The manuscript ends, and the book with it, on the governess holding Miles after the final confrontation, and on the report that "his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped." The whole argument comes down to one word, dispossessed. In one reading a possession has ended and the boy has been freed at the last moment. In the other he has been deprived, and her grip is what did it. The last word the book gives the child serves both readings equally, and no one from outside the manuscript is allowed back in to choose between them.
Black Swan, in 2010, carried the same commitment into a register James would not have recognised: psychological horror, with the body as its site. Nina, a dancer in a New York company, is cast as the Swan Queen and must dance both halves of the role, the innocent white swan and the black one who seduces the prince away from her. The camera stays close behind her for most of the film, often at her shoulder, and nothing reaches the audience that has not reached her first.
The ballet is itself a story of doubles, the enchanted swan and the sorcerer's daughter disguised as her, and the film lets the doubling leak into everything Nina sees. Her perceptions come apart one at a time:
Her reflection moves a beat after she does.
A woman passing her in a subway passage wears her face for an instant and then does not.
She finds scratches on her back she does not remember making.
She peels a strip of skin from beside a fingernail down to the knuckle, and in the next shot the finger is whole.
She takes Lily, the rival dancer, home after a night out and sleeps with her, and the next day Lily says she went home with someone else.
The film does correct her, repeatedly, and the corrections are its cleverest device, because each one arrives through the same channel that produced the error. The finger is whole because Nina now sees it whole. Lily's denial is spoken to Nina, by a woman Nina has already cast as her enemy, in a scene Nina is perceiving. A correction delivered by the unreliable consciousness settles nothing, and the film knows it.
The largest correction comes at the end. On opening night Nina fights Lily in the dressing room, kills her with a shard of broken mirror and hides the body. She goes out and dances the black swan better than she has ever danced anything. Then Lily knocks at the dressing room door to congratulate her, alive, and the shard is in Nina's own stomach. It is the only correction the film grants in full, and it arrives too late to help. Nina dances the last act, falls to the mat, and tells the people gathering round her that she felt it, that it was perfect. The house is applauding. The screen goes to white before anyone can tell us whether she lives, or whether the performance she felt was the performance the audience saw. Every answer the film might give has been placed inside the one person unable to give it.
The Father is the most instructive of the three because it needs so little. It has no ghosts and no horror imagery: no blood, no transformation, no dread in the score. The film was adapted by its director from his own stage play, and it produces its entire effect with three plain tools:
Casting. Two actors play the daughter and two play her husband, and the film never marks the substitution.
Set dressing. The flat changes between scenes, a kitchen, the colour of a wall, a painting that hung there and now does not, so that the viewer begins to understand, well before the father does, that his flat and his daughter's flat and a third place are being laid over one another.
Editing. The same evening happens twice with different details, and the second time his son-in-law hits him.
Of the three, The Father comes nearest to supplying a floor. The last scenes take place in a care home, where a nurse tells him that his daughter lives in Paris and visits at weekends, and the film treats this as bedrock. But the nurse is played by the actor who earlier walked into the kitchen as Anne, and a male nurse who looks in on him is played by one of the men who claimed to be Anne's husband. The floor the film finally offers has been built from the same materials as everything above it.
Even the ending is his.
I have watched The Father three times. The second and third viewings were no easier than the first. I knew which evening would repeat and whose face would come through the door, and the knowledge did no good, because what holds the viewer is the absence of anywhere else to stand, and knowing the plot does not supply one.
A twist is used up by the first viewing. This technique is not.
The reason the sustained form is rare is that the twist offers something it cannot: a moment. A twist can be marketed, discussed, protected from spoilers and rewarded with a second reading in which everything looks different. The sustained form offers a condition instead, and a condition is harder to sell. A reader who finishes The Turn of the Screw has nothing to announce. What they have is a book that goes on arguing with itself, and a century and a quarter of other readers arguing alongside it.
Film has to fight its medium to work this way. The camera's default is objective, and an audience believes what it sees unless it is told otherwise, which is why both films labour so hard: recasting a daughter, repainting a kitchen, putting a shard in the wrong body. Prose has the opposite default. Every sentence of a novel is somebody's account, even in the third person, and a novelist does not have to fight the form to stay inside one mind. The effort goes into the ending, where the conventions of the thriller send for a second witness. The detective arrives, or the police file, or the other narrator, or the confession in the final pages, and the reader is handed back to solid ground. The contemporary novelist can decline to send anyone.
The form that refuses most naturally is the diary. The governess wrote her manuscript years afterwards, when she knew how it ended, and James let that knowledge colour every page. A diary has no afterwards. Each entry is written by someone who does not know what the next will say, for no reader, with no one on hand to object, and whatever corrections it contains come from the same hand on a later day, which is no more trustworthy than it was the day before. It is the form I chose for a novel of my own, for exactly this reason. A diary does not end when the matter is resolved. It ends on the last day its writer had anything to say, and nobody comes afterwards to explain.