How We Got Here / Film

Examples of How We Got Here in Animated and Live Action Films.

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Animated

• Dead Space: Aftermath: The film begins with the derelict and heavily damaged ship, USG O'Bannon, drifting through space with most of its' crew already slaughtered. A military ship, the USM Abraxis, then shockpoints in and despatches a squad of marines to board the ship and discover the halls littered with torn up corpses and blood. A life scan picks up four survivors out of a crew of 137, who are then brought aboard the Abraxis and questioned one by one as to what their mission was and how the O'Bannon's crew was wiped out. An interesting example is that this trope is combined with "Rashomon"-Style, since each survivor remembers the preceding events very differently.
• The Emperor's New Groove begins with a sad llama sitting all alone in the middle of a rainstorm. The voiceover informs us this llama once was a powerful emperor. The first half of the movie focuses on how he got there. And when he gets here, the voiceover and the llama (both the same person) have an argument, and thus the narration stops.
• The movie Hoodwinked! starts at the Little Red Riding Hood climax — Red's confrontation with the Wolf impersonating Granny inside the cottage, Granny comes out of the closet, bound and gagged, and then a lumberjack, here named Kurt, bursts through the window. The police come by to investigate and interview all four characters, who then each tell their story about how they came to end up here, and each story is shown as individual flashbacks. Notably, once all four are complete, the film has quite a bit to go.
• Downplayed in Incredibles 2. The film opens with Rick Dicker interrogating Tony Rydinger about an unspecified "incident"... which turns out to have been Tony seeing Violet in her Incredibles uniform during the fight against the Underminer. His explanation takes all of two minutes before Dicker wipes Tony's memory. The film then flashes back to show the battle itself, and Rick being asked to wipe Tony's memory happens about twenty minutes in, after which the film progresses to the actual plot.
• Megamind starts with a slow-motion shot of the title character falling from a skyscraper, allegedly to his death. Pretty much the whole movie is devoted to showing how he got there. By the time we reach the scene again, he’s figured out how to get out of it and save the day.
• Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension opens with the title characters, Perry, Candace, and Doofenshmirtz being led by the alternate Doofenshmirtz to the Goozim before cutting to earlier to show how they got there. Amusingly, when we make it back to the opening scene, Phineas has different dialogue, subtly acknowledging the fact that we've already seen this scene.
  Phineas: (in the opening) I'll be honest, Ferb. I'm having a hard time putting a positive spin on this. But, I guess that's life, huh? One minute you're having the best day ever, the next you're being fed to a monster the size of a two car garage.
  Phineas: (when we finally catch up to the present) I'll be honest, Ferb. I'm having a hard time putting a positive spin on this. Blah blah blah, two-car garage, etcetera, etcetera.
• Ratatouille opens with Remy crashing through a glass window with a book over his head. The first part of the film is spent explaining how he got into that predicament.

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Live-Action

• 13 Minutes: The film opens with Elser's failed assassination attempt on Hitler, his capture, and shows how his life led to that moment afterward.
• 2:37 begins with one of the teachers discovering that someone committed suicide in a school lavatory at 2:37 p.m. The movie then flashes back to that morning and shows the events leading up to the suicide.
• The documentary 20 Days in Mariupol starts on Day 16 of the siege of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol by Russians with journalist and director Mstyslav Chernov inside the maternity hospital as Russian tanks start rolling in the streets of Mariupol and one starts aiming its gun at the hospital. Then there's a cut to Day 1.
• ABCs of Death 2: The final scene of "M is for Masticate" shows how all of the chaos we just witnessed started. Thirty-seven minutes ago, the cannibal decided to snort bath salts.
• The Beatles-inspired musical Across the Universe (2007) opens with the main character standing on a beach making a plea for the audience 'to listen to his story.' The entirety of the movie shows how he got there over the course of about three years or so.
• All About Eve begins at an award ceremony where Eve is about to be honoured. Then we flash back to the previous year and Eve's rise to fame. We end up back at the ceremony with Eve's acceptance speech.
• The Alligator People starts with nurse Marvin being put under hypnosis, and recounting her past forgotten identity as Mrs. Webber searching for her disappeared husband.
• American Beauty opens with Kevin Spacey's character revealing that he is dead. The rest of the movie covers the year preceding that event.
• Andhadhun begins with a farmer trying to shoot a hare roaming around his cabbage field. Towards the end, we find out that this led to Simi crashing her car and dying when she tried to run over Akash.
• MST3K film Angels Revenge begins with a bevy of beauties attacking some sort of shack in the middle of nowhere, when suddenly the frame freezes and we're treated to "I'll bet you're wondering what a nice girl like me is doing on the roof of this building..." which then leads us into the first half of the film being a flashback leading up to this event. The original theatrical release had a classic narrative, with no In Medias Res.
  • Likewise, I Accuse My Parents begins with our protagonist on trial for manslaughter, with his defense being a retelling of pretty much his entire life story up until that point.
    Jimmy: I accuse my parents.
    Tom Servo: That was a short movie.
• April Showers begins with Sean learning who committed the school shooting, and then flashes back to show the events leading up to that point.
• The Archer: The film opens on Laurel out in the wilderness, bloody streaks showing on her back through her tank top, and then shows the events which led to this, starting at weeks earlier.
• A Bad Moms Christmas begins with Amy (Mila Kunis) feeling that she may have ruined Christmas for her kids surrounded by a toppled-over Christmas tree and her house in total disarray and then flashes back to less than a week earlier.
• Bandits is a caper comedy that opens with news coverage showing the bank-robber protagonists having a Mexican Standoff with each other in the middle of what appears to be a robbery gone wrong, then flashes back to the jailbreak which brought them together in the first place.
• Better Luck Tomorrow begins with two of the main characters lying around in someone's back yard. A cell phone rings, but it's not theirs — the ringing is coming from underground. So they dig it up. "You never forget the sight of a dead body." The rest of the film is just one long flashback, and the opening scene is replayed near the end.
• Bet Your Life opens with Sonny being thrown off the balcony of Tower Casino, before the action freezes, and sonny's narration starts explaining how this situation came about.
• The Big Clock opens with George Stroud hiding inside the eponymous clock, and wondering how things had gotten so out of control in 36 hours. The movie then flashes back 36 hours.
• The Big Mouth uses the trope in a way that's obviously gratuitous and employs a swordfish.
• Big Trouble in Little China opens with Egg Shen's lawyer asking Egg Shen to explain what exactly caused the giant, green fireball over Chinatown. The film proceeds to explain the fireball... but the issue of why Egg Shen's lawyer was questioning him in the first place is never answered. This scene was included after principal shooting had wrapped due to Executive Meddling.
• Bird Box: The film opens with Malorie and her two kids making their way to a rowboat, blindfolded and setting off down the river. The film then jumps back five years to set up what is happening and jumps back and forth between their journey and the events that lead up to it.
• Black Wake: The movie begins with two government aliens trailing the protagonist and discussing what to do before being swarmed by zombies, all from the perspective of one of their eyeglass cameras. Then it jumps back six months.
• Blow starts with a scene that is repeated near the end, however, it is only the second time we get to see the end of the scene, and how quickly events of the scene become tragic.
• The Chang Cheh martial arts-war-epic film Blood Brothers (1973) literally starts with it's hero, Chiang Wen-Hsiang, being sentenced to execution in front of a local magistrate, over the murder of his eldest sworn brother. C Hiang then narrates to the audience the backstory of how the brother he had killed, Ma, betrayed him and his other brother, Huang, leading to the rest of the film unfolding via flashback.
• Body opens with a panicked 9-1-1 call over a black screen. The rest of the movie depicts the events leading up to that call.
• Bohemian Rhapsody opens with Freddie Mercury preparing to take the stage at Live Aid in 1985 before flashing back to 1970.
• The Bothersome Man opens in a subway, where a couple kisses without any emotion whatsoever, and then a man jumps in front of a train. Some took the rest of the film as what happens once he's dead, but it becomes obvious that it's this trope when it comes back to the same scene. He's clearly in some kind of hell, because it seems he can't die, and just gets hopelessly bloodied, bruised and generally knocked about by the train, without dying.
• Buffaloed: The film opens on Peg cussing, running somewhere, and firing a gun in the air. Her narration then stops the film and rewinds to the events that got her there.
• Carlito's Way starts with Carlito being taken away to the hospital.
• Cas and Dylan begins with Dylan driving while nursing her injured hand in an ice-filled cooler. Distracted by what's in the cooler, she loses control of the car and drives into a ditch, which propels the contents of the cooler - Cas' dead dog - into her lap. Cue hysterical screaming, followed by a rewind to two days prior.
• Casino begins with Ace's car blowing up with him inside.
• Citizen Kane opens with the titular Kane Dying Alone, with his life up until then being told in a series of flashbacks (with the Framing Device of a reporter trying to find out the meaning of his final word, 'Rosebud').
• Class of Nuke 'Em High Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown: The movie begins with a seemingly normal day, before chaos erupts in the school. People are screaming running and screaming in a panic, and then a giant mutated squirrel starts attacking. Then Roger starts running away carrying Victoria, before setting her down and bringing a tape recorder up to his mouth. He then begins documenting what he thinks could be his final moments.
• Cloverfield features a very subtle version. Early in the movie the video we are watching is said to have been recorded over another video. As the camera films the giant monster's rampage through the city and the character's attempts to survive, the camera keeps playing clips of the old video that was recorded over which is a vacation video of the characters going to Coney Island. In the movie's end we cut one last time to the old video after the monster is bombed by the army. In this last clip you can just barely notice that far off in the background, a very large object falls into the ocean from the sky....
• Cruel and Unusual: The film gradually shows what led up to Edgar being in the afterlife, reliving his memories every time he enters a certain room.
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has an elderly woman called Daisy dying in hospital and she gets her daughter to read from the diary of the main character and the movie constantly switches between Benjamin's life story and the daughter's reaction. When the diary is finished being read Daisy fills in the last part herself.
• Daredevil (2003) begins this way, with a mortally wounded Daredevil explaining in narration how he got to be in that position. Once his origin is told and the story catches up to that point, however, Daredevil inexplicably shrugs off his injuries (he literally gets up and walks it off).
• Daredreamer starts with Winston narrating to Zach about his time at school, his friends, and how he got expelled, which occurs near the end of the film.
• Dave Made a Maze: The first scene of the film is an excerpt of Harry's interview with Dave for his documentary, which doesn't happen until the last twenty minutes of the movie.
• The Day the Earth Caught Fire: The film begins with a man walking through deserted London into a newspaper office. His typewriter doesn't work, so he phones up the only other person in the building, and asks her to take down his story. The rest of the film shows us how London ended up like that, ending with the man in his office finishing his story, and waiting to see if the world will be saved.
• The opening voiceover in Deadly Harvest explains how the climate crisis came to be, listing such causes as overpopulation, unchecked urban sprawl, the energy crisis, industrial pollution, lack of government funding for research programs, and the high cost of transporting grain.
• Happens often in Deadpool (2016). The film opens with a revolving shot of Deadpool hijacking a car in the middle of a bridge. The film proceeds to show how he got there, from riding a taxi to stopping in the bridge. As he wipes the floor with various goons, we flashback to much earlier in his life from before he got his cancer. When Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead appear, he flashes back to when he got his cancer. And after falling into a truck, it then flashbacks to how he got his superpowers. Once we get back to the taxi, the film fast forwards back to the truck scene. Deadpool lampshades this:
  Deadpool: Oh wait, you've already seen this.
  • Deadpool 2 continues this trend with the first scene being Deadpool blowing himself up. The next few scenes explain how he came to do something so drastic.
• Beautifully subverted in The Debt: near the beginning of the movie, a character (in 1997) reads a passage from a non-fiction book about an espionage mission she undertook in 1965. As she reads, we see the scene — the climax of the mission — unfold as a Flashback. The events leading up to the climax take up most of the rest of the film, and the scene from the book eventually repeats itself. Except that this time, when the Nazi prisoner knocks the heroine's head against the radiator, she's knocked out cold, and the bad guy gets away. Turns out that the three spies sent to capture him couldn't bear to report their failure and instead told the world that they'd killed him, knowing he'd go into hiding and no one but them would know he was alive.
• Deewaar begins with Ravi dedicating a prize he got for his services to the police force to his mother Sumitra, and then flashes back to show everything that happened up to that point.
• Deliver Us from Eva begins with the protagonist's funeral.
• Desolation (2017) begins with Abby trudging through the woods, holding her son's jacket, and screaming for help before flashing back to hiking through the woods with her son and her friend.
• D.O.A. opens with a scene towards the end of the story and then has the hero tell how he got there.
• Donnie Darko: There is a homage to "Mad World" in the second-to-last scene, in which we see many characters as they were before the plot took off. Or...where they are now, depending on how one interprets the whole time-travel thing.
• Double Indemnity, through the device of the protagonist's confession.
• The wuxia Duel For Gold opens with a scene in a valley where three bloodied corpses are propped which near several opened crates of gold ingots. The movie then flashes back to a story of betrayal among elite thieves, culminating into the titular duel.
• The movie adaptation of Bernard Pomerance's play, The Elephant Man, added a scene that is not in the original play after the end of all the play's events, so that Treves, as narrator, could use this trope. Arguably, this was to help explain the story to American audiences unfamiliar with the history, as in the play, there was no helpful narration either.
• Eloïse's Lover: The film starts by showing Àsia's mother in the hospital after she gets in an accident. It's then shown how this happened and what led up to the event. It was actually suicide.
• Emperor (2020): The film begins with the raid on Harper's Ferry, prominently featuring Shields, then cuts back to months earlier, when Shields was still a slave.
• The Enforcer (1951): The film opens with the police guarding Rico, The Stool Pigeon, right before the trial of the Murder, Inc. leader Rico used to work for. After Rico dies, the police then recall everything that led to the arrests of Rico and his boss, trying to figure out a way to keep their case alive, and most of the remaining movie is told in flashbacks or flashbacks within flashbacks.
• Equinox: While in the hospital, Dave tells the story of what had happened.
• Ferry Cross the Mersey opens with Gerry And The Pacemakers as big international stars, then flashes back to before they got big.
• Fight Club starts with Tyler Durden holding a gun in the Narrator's mouth. The film plays with and Lampshades it: Tyler first asks the Narrator if he has anything to say, and he says he doesn't. When the film catches up with itself (after the narrator states that "this is where we came in"), he asks the question again, and the Narrator replies he still can't think of anything, and Tyler quips, "Flashback humor."
• The Final opens up with a girl walking into a BBQ restaurant, her face horribly disfigured and hidden under her hair and a hoodie, with her fellow patrons all staring at her. She used to be the Alpha Bitch.
• The very first shot of Float Like A Butterfly is Frances hugging her father after beating Eamann in a fight, which happens at the end.
• For Love Of The Game has aging baseball pitcher Billy Chapel pitching the final game of his career, with most of the movie taken up by his reminiscences of the ups and downs of his career and the effects it's had on his relationship. Between the flashbacks, Chapel is pitching a perfect game and not even realizing it until his flashbacks reach where he is now.
• Forrest Gump features Forrest talking about his life up until that point to people he's waiting at the bus stop with.
• Friend of the World opens with a tape recorder briefly describing the twist before cutting to flashback footage and an earlier scene before the characters have met.
• Ghost Lab (2021): The movie begins with two figures being introduced at a presentation. The movie then cuts back to Dr. Wee being woken up. When we get back to the scene we cut back from, it's eventually revealed to be a dream Dr. Wee had after Dr. Gla killed himself for the sake of the experiment.
• Goodfellas begins with Henry, Tommy and Jimmy disposing of a dead body, the flashes back to Henry's childhood and follows him until we reach this point again at around the middle of the film.
• Goodbye Christopher Robin opens with the Milne's getting the message that he's dead and their reaction, then flashes back to A.A Milne just after WWI, through the conception of Winnie-The-Pooh until it reaches the letter-scene.
• Graduation starts with Jackson in the bank with a blood trail on the floor and a gun in his hand in the middle of a Hostage Situation, with his voice-over telling the audience this is why he is not at his graduation. The film then goes back to explain how he ended up in this situation.
• The Greatest Showman begins with P. T. Barnum presenting his circus to an appreciative crowd in a rousing musical number. The music and the audience gradually fade as Barnum sings "It's everything you ever want/It's everything you ever need...." to where it seems he's talking to himself rather than the audience. Thus starts a flashback to Barnum as a boy admiring a frock coat and top hat in the tailor shop his father works at. When "The Greatest Show" is reprised, it's right where the flashback started. Barnum hands his partner his top hat and tells him to take over as ringmaster, saying that he's going to watch his girls grow up.
• Guns, Girls and Gambling opens with a Elvis Impersonator at a bus stop in the middle of the desert. He boards an empty bus, but is followed by a Statuesque Stunner in a Spy Catsuit wielding twin Glock 17s and gunfire ensues. The action then halts and John Smith's narration starts to explain how this unusual situation came to be.
• Guyana: Crime of the Century: A very strange example, since the film begins with with a graphic depiction of a man shooting himself in the head in a bathroom in 1979 without really explaining who he is, then cuts to James Johnson's 1977 sermon. It was actually a brief dramatization of the death of former Temple insider Michael Prokes, who held a press conference about four months after the tragedy at a motel in Modesto, California, then killed himself afterwards.
• The Hangover has a double-dose of this. It starts with the main characters in the middle of the Nevada desert saying they're not going to make it to the wedding before flashing back two days. Then there's a variation when the crazy night happens, and in the aftermath leaves the characters asking how they got there.
• This is one possible interpretation of Head. It opens with The Monkees interrupting the dedication of a bridge then Micky Dolenz throwing himself off it. The movie itself has no coherent plot, and events are tied together through transitions and occasional recurring elements. Nonetheless, there is a slight sense of progression, culminating in the band running away from many of the film's characters and interrupting the dedication in the process, then all of them jumping off a bridge to escape, bringing us back to the beginning.
• The documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse opens with director Francis Ford Coppola presenting Apocalypse Now at Cannes. After that, we get the story of the movie's infamous Troubled Production.
• The Hole opens up with the protagonist Liz stumbling towards her school after spending 10 days locked in an old war bunker. The circumstances are then told in a series of flashbacks to a police psychologist. Halfway through the film we discover Liz made up the first half of the story and another person tells the truth about the circumstances and Liz remembers the real story.
• Everything between the opening and closing scenes of The Hoodlum is devoted to showing the audience how things reached the point where Johnny has Vincent Down in the Dumps and is about to execute him.
• House of Sand and Fog opens and ends with the same scene of Jennifer Connelly's character staring blankly at her house.
• How To Blow Up A Pipeline: All the characters get sequences showing how their lives were prior to the bombing, and why they joined up with the plan.
• Im Juli opens with a scene chronologically towards the end of the movie. Therein the hero tells the story of how he ended up in that remote place.
• Inception opens with Cobb washing up on a shore and being taken to an elderly man. Said man sees his items, says it reminds him of someone he met long ago. Then the main plot begins. In the film's ending, it turns out Cobb is there to rescue the man from the dream he's been trapped for long enough for him to age.
• I Wanted Wings starts with Jeff getting a court martial hearing. The story of how he got there is told in one big flashback.
• Jennifer's Body: The film starts with Needy in a prison psych ward, and most of the film consists of her showing us how she got to that point.
• The Jerk starts by showing Navin Johnson homeless. He then narrates his journey from rags to riches to rags.
• Just Married opens with Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy bickering over their bad honeymoon, before showing Kutcher reminiscing how he and Murphy got married and how bad their honeymoon was.
• Kill Your Darlings opens with a shirtless Lucien Carr disposing of a body in a river, covered in blood.
• Kind Hearts and Coronets opens with the protagonist in prison, about to be executed. He decides to spend his last hours on earth writing his memoirs... cue flashback.
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang starts with Harry telling the viewers how he and Harmony ended up in the same party, which is effectively the first act of the film.
• Ladder 49 is about a firefighter who is trapped in a very large burning building after saving someone's life and is unsuccessful in escaping, with flashbacks involving his career, marriage, and family making up the bulk of the movie.
• Lantana opens on a shot of a dead body entangled in the weeds under a lantana plant, before jumping back to a few days before her death.
• The Kubrick version of Lolita begins with Humbert Humbert going to see Quilty, asking him about a certain 'Lolita' and shooting him to death behind a portrait. The movie ends with Humbert walking into Quilty's house and a written epilogue over a frozen frame of the painting explains that Humbert died in prison while waiting for his trial.
• Love Is Not Perfect: The film opens in 2012 at the time it was made, showing Elena's growing Bisexual Love Triangle between Ettore and Adriana. It often goes back eight years to 2004 however showing how her life reached that point.
• Love Story starts right off with "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?" and thus gives you plenty of time to find some tissues.
• Man on a Ledge opens with the title character standing on the ledge of a building, looking like he's ready to jump. The first half hour of the movie shows us what led to that point.
• Maverick opens with the title character sitting on a horse with a noose around his neck and his hands tied behind him. He says in voiceover, "It had just been a shitty week for me from the beginning." The first half or so of the movie shows us what happened that week.
• The Matrix Reloaded opens with Trinity falling from an upper window of an office building with an Agent in pursuit. She gets shot, then Neo wakes up — it was All Just a Dream. Then at the end, we realize Neo's dream was prophetic.
• The opening scene of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl takes place after the story, showing Greg's struggle to write down what happened. We return to the scene at the end when he finally finishes his essay and sends it off.
• The first scene of Melancholia is the titular planet destroying Earth, then it flashes back to the past.
• It could be said that the movie Memento is based on this device. The movie starts at the end then goes through each previous scene in backwards order, establishing... well ...how he got there.
• Michael Clayton opens with a sequence then rewinds to four days earlier and then revisits the opening with more information and greater context that gives it a new meaning.
• Midnight Mary begins with a woman ignoring her murder trial by reading Cosmopolitan. While the jury's out trying to reach a verdict, she finds herself telling a kindly clerk her life's story.
• Mission: Impossible III's prologue scene opens with Ethan and his wife Julia bound to a chair, with Ethan told that a charge has been planted in his head and being interrogated about where the Rabbit's Foot is by Davian. Davian counts to ten and shoots Julia in the head. However, it later turns out that the woman shot was not Julia, but Davian's head of security.
• Monsters opens with a convoy of soldiers retrieving a young couple, then getting attacked by a giant alien which kills or wounds the woman. The rest of the movie depicts how the couple got to that point, but ends before actually reaching it.
• Moulin Rouge! opens with Christian typing up his story and then it goes back to show what events led to him writing the story to begin with.
• The Mountie opens with Pacheck holding a Sawn-Off Shotgun to Cleora's head and using her as a Human Shield as he calls on Corporal Grayling to surrender. The movie then flashes back, with occasional narration from Cleora, to explain what is going on and how everyone ended up in this situation.
• Murder is My Beat opens with Bert finding Patrick hiding from the law alone in a hotel room. Bert asks him what possessed him to help a convicted murderer escape. Patrick explains, complete with Flashback Effects.
• My Way: The movie opens with the 1948 London Marathon and a "Kim Jun-shik" running past many marathon runners. The movie then flashes back all the way to 1928 explaining how he got there.
• Nemesis Game opens with Jeff Novak questioning Emily Gray in a police interrogation room about an unspecified crime she is supposed to committed. The film then flashes back and the words "Two Weeks Earlier" appear on the screen.
• The opening scene of Never Grow Old has Patrick standing in front of the burnt-out saloon with its tattered American flag. He then hefts his blunderbuss and strides across the road and into the church where a voice is reading out a bible verse. The movie then flashes back to several months earlier.
• No Man of Her Own is told this way with a beginning narration in a whispered voice by Barbara Stanwyck.
• No Way Out (1987) opens with Lt. Commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) being interrogated in a house by two men. We then flash back to six months earlier, and the rest of the film shows us what happened in those six months that led to that interrogation.
• Not Okay opens with the protagonist giving a narration while seeing Twitter, Youtube and just about the rest of the internet utterly despise her. Most of the movie is showing how she became a Bad Influencer that earned such hate.
• Nutcracker Massacre: The movie begins with a delivery man dropping off a package behind a house. Then he is attacked and killed by the killer nutcracker. Then the movie jumps back two days.
• Nymphomaniac opens with a Downer Beginning, then the female lead tells the male lead how she ended up all bruised in an alley.
• Megiddo: Omega Code 2 starts off with the battle of Armageddon and fills the rest of its running time showing how the Antichrist and his brother, who became the President of the United States, got to where they are now in the battle.
• One Cut of the Dead plays out the entire first act in one shot, then cuts to several months earlier to show the lead-up to how we got to that moment. The final act shows the first act again from a different perspective.
• Pain & Gain starts with the cops going after Daniel, and then flashing back to 6 months earlier.
• Pan's Labyrinth; however, it's only obvious that this is what they did when the movie comes back to the shot near the end.
• Paranormal Asylum: The film begins with Michelle, possessed by Typhoid Mary's ghost, wandering through the house at night. The next scene shows Mark returning to New York, revealing this is the case later on.
• Paulie features a sentient parrot locked up in an animal testing lab telling his life story to a janitor of how he got here during his trek of trying to locate Marie, his owner in his earliest memories and living through multiple owners.
• The movie (and, by extension, the album) Pink Floyd: The Wall starts in Pink's trashed hotel room, with Pink having already completed the metaphorical wall — from there the movie goes into flashbacks, with many of the subsequent songs/scenes describing the different "bricks" of his life which helped build it. (Although, confusingly, there is also a brief flash-forward to Fascist Pink at the concert/rally for the song "In the Flesh?" right near the beginning.)
• Please Murder Me! opens with defense lawyer Craig Carlson buying a pistol at a pawn shop and depositing it in his office desk drawer with a file folder. He dictates a message into a tape recorder for district attorney Ray Willis, revealing that he expects to be murdered within an hour, and he begins to tell his story in extended flashbacks.
• Polite People shows how Lárus ended up driving around the countryside, sleeping in his car and breaking into the supermarket for food.
• Premium Rush opens with the protagonist in mid-air after a catastrophic crash. The first part of the film shows how he got to that point, the second part shows what happens next.
• Psychos begins with two policemen investigating the house in which most of the movie takes place, before flashing back to the protagonists going about their lives.
• Pulp Fiction begins and ends with the same scene in the diner, but from the perspective of different characters.
• Quadrophenia opens with Jimmy walking away from a cliff after sending a scooter off of it at the end of the film.
• A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die! starts with Pembroke and Eli standing in the aftermath of the massacre at Fort Holman. An Opening Scroll then gives some details and says that what follows is the true story, and then the film then flashes back to before the mission started.
• The Report opens with the main character meeting with a lawyer, and the rest of the film shows us why.
• Requiem (2021): The film opens with Evelyn gazing hatefully at a man with fire shown in the background. After that, it's shown what led up to these events and what was going on.
• Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster begins with Shaggy, Scooby, Daphne, and Fred chasing the witch through the house and unmasking her, expressing astonishment at her unseen identity. The rest of the film explains how the gang got to that point.
• The Scribbler opens with police psychologist Silk (Eliza Dushku) arriving at a high-rise halfway house where a series of suspicious jumper-suicides have occurred. After surveying the crime scene, she begins interrogating Suki (one of the surviving patients) with partner Moss (Michael Imperioli). Suki's testimony, shown in flashback, then tells the story.
• Shimotsuma Motogari opens with the main character speeding around some truly epic scenery porn on a motorscooter while wearing a frilly Victorian style dress. She is hit by a truck carrying cabbages and slow-motion falls through the air, quietly thinking about all the people, clothing brands and embroidery she'll miss now that she's dead. The screen then says THE END before she realizes that 'that's a bit too short, so let's rewind a little'. We then get the series of events that led up to this moment, followed by the conclusion of the movie.
• The first few shots of Shrooms show an unidentified woman running through the woods, clearly panicked. At the end of the film, Tara runs into the woods after escaping from the ambulance.
• Sid & Nancy opens with Nancy's body being taken out of the hotel where they were living, followed by Sid in handcuffs being led away by police. At police HQ, the detective asks Sid what happened, and the film jumps back a few years to the beginning of their relationship.
• Six Reasons Why opens with a Mexican Standoff between The Nomad, The Entrepreneur, The Sherpa and The Criminal in the middle of the desert. The rest of the film is dedicated to explaining how they ended up in this situation.
• Played with in the Disney Channel Original Movie The Slumber Party: The film begins In Medias Res with the protagonist, Megan, narrating that she doesn't remember why she is in her current situation, then rewinds the film to try and figure out. This kicks off a plot reminiscent of The Hangover, where Megan and her friends wake up from being hypnotized to find that they don't remember the previous night and one of their number is missing. When the film eventually catches up to the present, Megan apologizes to the audience for still not really having answers to give them.
• Snapshot (1979) opens with firefighters discovering a badly charred body in a burnt out room. The rest of the film is dedicated to telling us how this happened and whose body it is.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) begins with Sonic being chased by Robotnik throughout San Francisco. There is a pause as a voice-over from Sonic relates how he got to this point. The film quickly rewinds to his childhood in the Green Hill Zone of his home planet and moves from there. Then during the climax, it catches up to the freezeframe where the movie started.
  Sonic: So, here we are again. We've been through so much together! Now you understand why there's a psychotic robot doctor chasing a supersonic blue hedgehog! Wanna know how it ends? Yeah, me too!
• Sunset Boulevard starts with the main character explaining why he's floating face down in a pool.
• The film Swordfish, which probably did it so they could show off the coolest scene in the movie twice: once as the opening scene, and again about 2/3 through that
• Talon Falls: The film starts with a man driving through the woods, when Lyndsey runs out onto the road to get him to stop. She gets into the car, and the driver is attacked by her pursuer. The driver manages to get them away, and then we see Lyndsey being interrogated while blindfolded. She begins relating her story, and the movie cuts to the day before, when said story starts.
• Thor: opens with Thor getting hit by a truck in the middle of the desert. The next half-hour or so is spent on how he got there, and why being hit with a truck would be bad for him.
• Through Black Spruce: The film opens with Will being threatened by men, then shows what led up to this later near the end.
• Transcendence, opens with the ending scene, making it clear the Apocalypse How went down already.
• Truth (2015) opens with Mary Mapes, the main character, meeting up with her lawyer, and the rest of the movie shows us what led to that meeting.
• Uncharted: The film opens with Nathan Drake trying to climb into a plane in mid-air. Then, the first half of the film shows what led him to that moment.
• Undercover vs. Undercover starts with the protagonist waking up in a container, with a Time Bomb ticking in front of him. Before flashing back to days ago regarding how he got into all these mess - turns out he was an undercover cop investigating the triads, only to blow his cover and get knocked out during a sting. The climatic final shootout goes back to him in the container breaking out and killing thugs left and right.
• Unknown (2006) involves five men waking up in a warehouse with no memory of how they got there and soon learning that at least two of them have been kidnapped and at least two of them are the kidnappers...
• Vanilla Sky is shown by being told from David, the main character, to Curtis, a psychiatrist from prison.
• Vanishing Point opens with Kowalski heading at high speed towards a huge police roadblock, complete with bulldozers. Flash back to two days previous to discover how he got there.
• The 1925 silent film Variety starts off with the main character in prison for murder. The majority of the film is his account of how he ended up there.
• The biopic Veronica Guerin begins with the titular character being gunned down as she's driving home from traffic court. The film then flashes back to two years earlier, when she began her work investigating the drug trade in Ireland.
• Watchmen: The Cold Open is a montage of how different the world is (particularly America), and how the lineup of the titular Watchmen have changed throughout the years to the "present day" of the film.
• TV movie Wedding Belles had a kickass one wherein a bride and three bridesmaids dig up a grave, round up three other guys they have some sort of beef with, and shoot them [including the corpse] down by the docks. Somewhat disappointingly, it turns out to be a wish fulfillment dream.
• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story opens on the fictional version of "Weird Al" Yankovic being rushed into the emergency room before rewinding to the beginning.
• Who Am I (2014) opens towards the end of the story where the protagonist enters a hotel room to find dead people inside. The rest of the movie tells the story of how he got to that point.
• The Woman in Red: The film starts with Teddy in Charlotte's husband's robe out on the window ledge after he came home two days early.
• Women Is Losers: Celina is first shown as married to Matea with a young son, and then the film goes back to show things led up to there.
• Written on the Wind begins with Kyle entering his family home in a drunken rage. A gunshot is heard, and a man stumbles out and falls to the ground. Then the movie jumps back a little over a year to Mitch and Lucy's first encounter.
• The Yes Men begins with the two men in a bathroom, rushing to get one of their number into a ridiculous-looking golden bodysuit and arguing about time zones. As it turns out, this is just before they carry out their first major hoax, but they've got plenty more to go through before the film is over.