Detour

In the film detour, we see a very interesting main character. While at the beginning, you might rush to call him a hero, even after the bar scene, simply because he seems like an honest person. However, as the movie goes on, it's played up to make him feel more and antihero, or maybe even a villain. The film does a good job making you believe this a lot by what it subtly does. As with most noir films, lighting is key. While it is black-and-white, they still managed to play a lot with the darks especially when filming our hero. The hat is almost key here as it creates a constant chatter on his face. Later he does take it off though, but the open shirt and disheveled look still lends to a confusing image. A lot of the confusion on moral standpoint comes from the actors face though. He doesn't excellent job of either emoting a lot, or not at all. When we see him sitting in the car, or just thinking, he has an excellent display of no emotion. But when we get nice and close, he does quite a good job of showing his anxieties. This causes a bit of a confusion as to what kind of a person he really is. But inevitably, we realize what we have here is an unreliable narrator that we're seeing this film through. As he begins to question himself, and we hear him going back and forth in his head, we understand that what we're really seeing is just somebody's version of what happened. And when we've got somebody who appears as unreliable as he is, we realize that what they're showing us is more than likely not what we're actually out to see.