Character Truth

“The Way Characters Perceive & Understand Their Truth”

In Auntrolye, no character lies, but that doesn't mean they are right. 

The genre rejects traditional binaries of truth and falsehood. Instead, it treats truth as perception backed by emotional conviction. A character’s version of events may not align with external fact, but if that version governs how they act, feel, and interpret their world, it becomes the functional reality of the film. In other words, what they believe becomes what we see.

This is not an exercise in narrative deceit. Auntrolye does not rely on unreliable narrators, where the audience is later told what “really” happened. Rather, its characters are reliably distorted, meaning their internal logic is rendered with unwavering cinematic fidelity, even when fundamentally flawed. The camera doesn’t betray them, it partners with them.

Memory, then, is not exposition, it is structure. When a character misremembers out of guilt, love, repression, or denial, that misremembered reality reshapes the fabric of the narrative. It isn’t presented as a flashback to be corrected later. It is treated as present tense law. For example, a false accusation believed by the accuser will play out on-screen as entirely real until that belief is psychologically challenged or fractured. But even then, the “correction” is not guaranteed. The truth may shift again.

This produces a genre where characters are not deceptive, but self-protective, defending their identity through partial or fragmented internal truths. Their actions are driven by emotional necessity, not objective accuracy. And because the genre respects those necessities, viewers are forced to navigate a world that is coherent on the inside, disjointed on the outside.

It’s not about knowing what happened. It’s about understanding why the character believes it did, and how that belief unravels or reinforces who they are. This is what makes Auntrolye both narratively radical and psychologically precise: the film does not represent reality, it manifests the logic of someone living through their own distorted, unshakable truth.