When I was a kid, I saw a movie – I thought its title was something like ‘eye of the beholder’, but IMDB doesn’t have anything like it (there is a more recent movie with that title).
Anyway, it is an old black and white, and starts with a scene with a body lying in a pool of blood, then goes through the story from different perspectives from various people involved in the story. As the movie progresses, more and more details about the incident come to light.
Toward the end, it turns out the pool of blood was a bucket of paint that got dumped.
I saw it some 40 years ago, so I may have details wrong…
I don’t know your movie, but the archetype for that device is Rashomon (1950). It’s been used a number of times in movies and TV programs. Possibly the next best-known example of it that I can think of is The Outrage (1964). No answer, but it’s a free bump.
I am not familiar with this movie, but the idea has certainly been done many times, although I think, like Earl, that most were inspired by Akira Kurasawa’s film Rashomon. The other film he cites, The Outrage, is simply Rashomon remade as a western (as they did with other Kurasawa samurai epics, the way The Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven). he cast is wonderfully weird – Clair Bloom, Edward G. Robinson, a pre-1776 Howard da Silva, a younbg pre-Star Trek William Shatner, and Paul Newman as a Mexican bandit (!)
Most of the other versions I’ve seen have been from sitcoms, such as the episode of All in the Family, where they show the same event from Archie’s, Mike’s, and ultimately Edith’s point of view.
A similar idea appears in one of Robert H,. van Gulik’s Judge Dee short stories. reprinted in the volume Judge Dee at Work.
They used that method in the underrated kid’s animated flick “Hoodwinked!”
It tells the classic little red riding hood story several times over from various characters perspectives.
“9 1/2 minutes,” one of the episodes of Coupling, did this by showing the same events from different perspectives. Superb writing where something was mysterious in one telling and hilarious in another.
I think I saw something like this on “Poirot,” which might (would) make it an Agatha Christie story?
A young girl is found “murdered” in the garden of an estate over Christmas holidays; her body disappears, and all of the guests suspect one another. In the meantime, she isn’t really dead, and the whole thing was faked … or something like that.
Just a guess, but I do think the story I saw was similar to yours.