I heard you like unreliable narrators, so we put some unreliable narrators in your unreliable narration.
The technique of showing us things we’ve already seen from a new vantage point likely didn’t originate with Kurosawa’s film, but Rashoman feels like a perfection of the concept.
I can also remember the moment when I first watched this film and realized that the next witness in the trial was going to be the murder victim himself, as told via medium. I’m pretty sure I paused for a moment to step back and soak that development in. It’s the compounding of unreliable narrators in that moment, where you have a medium (and the questionable trustworthiness of that profession) combined with the fact that the person they’re supposedly channeling would not provide an unbiased account of their own murder.
It’s not only a film that highlights the way that conflicting accounts from eyewitnesses can muddy the truth of an event, but a reminder that film is bent to the will of the filmmakers in what it shows us as true. The same characters in the same settings take on different actions and give different meaning to the moments on screen each time events play out.
Everything here is a lie, but what can looking at the lies tell us about the truth that lies beneath?
This Builds Character 
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