A narrative that employs reverse chronology presents effects before causes, asking the audience to piece together information about character motivations and the plot and encouraging them to ask themselves questions like "is this why she acted this way?"
Iain Banks's novel Use of Weapons (1990) interweaves two parallel stories, one told in standard chronology and one in reverse, both concluding at a critical moment in the main character's life.
Julia Alvarez's novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) opens in 1989 with one of the characters returning to her native Dominican Republic.
All the Birds, Singing (2013) by the Australian author Evie Wyld, relates two stories in parallel, both beginning from the same point in time, one running forwards and one backwards.
In 1927, Jean Epstein's La glace à trois faces (The Three Sided Mirror) features a sequence where the events happen in reverse, beginning with the protagonist's exit from a room until the viewer sees the entrance.
[9] Atom Egoyan, influenced by Pinter's plays, tells the story of The Sweet Hereafter (1997) in reverse chronology, with the first scene of the film set in 1977 and the last in 1968.
[10] The technique was later employed in Peppermint Candy (2000), by South Korean director Lee Chang-dong; in Memento (2000), a mystery directed by Christopher Nolan about short-term memory loss; and in Jean-Luc Godard's short film De l'origine du XXIe siècle pour moi (2000).
Peppermint Candy begins with the protagonist, Yongho, disrupting a class reunion, then climbing onto nearby railroad tracks where he waits for a train to hit him, screaming "I want to go back!"
The film then shows earlier periods of Yongho's life, each time preceded by a view of him on the tracks from further away, as the experiences that made him disillusioned and suicidal are revealed, culminating in him as an idealistic young man optimistic about his future at his class's graduation at the same riverfront park.
The film was highly controversial for its graphic nature; had the scenes been shown in chronological order, this violent content would make it a simple, and pointlessly brutal, revenge movie.
I Love You, the scenes in which Gerry Kennedy (Gerard Butler) meets and courts Holly (Hilary Swank) are shown in reverse.
A 1997 Star Trek: Voyager episode, "Before and After", which writer Kenneth Biller claimed was based on a Martin Amis novel Time's Arrow, also features a character experiencing the events in reverse along with the audience.