Christopher Nolan is mainstream cinema’s prince of darkness. From his 2000 breakout Memento, a nihilistic, time-turning revenge fantasy; through three gritty, decaying Batman movies (tied, indelibly, to the awful death of star Heath Ledger); to the tragedy embedded in the brain-frying set-ups of Inception, Interstellar and Tenet, he’s unafraid to lean into the heavy stuff. You go and see a Nolan movie to be awed, devastated, or cosmically rearranged – but not for a giggle and a good time.
Too often overlooked amid this pantheon of the dark and the depressing is The Prestige, which was released 15 years ago in November. Unusual among Nolan’s body of work for its low-budget (his films usually come in at around the $150 million mark; this one was made for $40 million), period setting (it’s based on Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel about the rivalry between two real-life Victorian stage magicians), and ensuing lack of huge special effects-heavy set pieces, it is sometimes dismissed as Nolan-lite – a whacky little costume drama about magic among all the heavier sci-fi stuff.
In fact, it’s his darkest film. Set in the precarious world of 19th-century stage magic, it follows two young tricksters – charming Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and dogged Alfred Borden (Christian Bale); collective initials ABRA – hustling to succeed. The lengths they will go to do so are horrible: in their very first show, their assistant, who also happens to be Angier’s wife, Julia (Piper Perabo), drowns in a glass tank when the trick-knot Borden is supposed to tie to enable her escape goes wrong. As the film continues, the injury and body counts rise and rise. This is partly the result of their increasingly violent rivalry, triggered by Angier’s desire for vengeance after Julia’s death, but also down to their relentless pursuit of success.
How much should your art cost you? That is the question Nolan poses and also one he transposes, self-reflexively, onto filmmaking. Magic is an easy stand-in for cinema – both are modes of illusion – and this enables him, beneath a gripping, surprisingly violent tale of an antagonism bucketing out of control, to dazzle us with his grand theory of movie-making. “I think that cinema has over the years co-opted an enormous amount of the pop appeal of magic,” Nolan said at the time of release. “Which is why this is a period film – magicians in the Victorian era were like the filmmakers or even the movie stars or rock stars of their day.”
Why are human beings so susceptible to the magic of cinema? And what is it that compels people like Nolan to make movies? These may sound like innocuous enough questions but Nolan’s answers, which speak to his views of human nature as much as to cinema, are utterly bleak. “Price is no object,” Angier tells Nikola Tesla (a delicious cameo from David Bowie). “Perhaps not but have you considered the cost?” comes the famous inventor’s reply.
