The Prestige Review

Christopher Nolan structures the film exactly as the trick it describes: pledge, turn, prestige, told through nested diaries in which two unreliable narrators read each other's lies. The audacity is that the central secret sits in plain sight from the first scene, encoded in Christian Bale's doubled performance, two men calibrated just differently enough that the reveal plays fair on a second viewing.

Hugh Jackman weaponizes his own showman's charm as Angier, a man who mistakes applause for meaning, and David Bowie's Tesla drifts through like a warning from a colder genre. Wally Pfister shoots Victorian London in coal-dark interiors pierced by stage light, and the field of glowing bulbs outside Tesla's Colorado lab is the film's thesis in a single image: wonder with a body count.

The screenplay's obsession with sacrifice, birds in cages, drowned assistants, hands ruined by bullets, gives the twist moral weight rather than mere cleverness. A few connective scenes exist only to shuffle the chronology, the one visible seam in the engineering. It is Nolan's most complete marriage of theme and mechanism, a film about the cost of a trick that is itself flawlessly performed.