I think The Prestige is one of Christopher Nolan’s best movies but, although I prefer it to Inception and Tenet, I’m still not sure if I actually understand its ending. A look back on Christopher Nolan’s movies proves that the director has never been a fan of straightforward narrative simplicity. Some of Nolan’s more cerebral efforts, like 2023’s Oscar-winning biopic Oppenheimer, use immersive filmmaking techniques to penetrate the tortured psyche of his subjects. However, others are more conventional exercises in genre filmmaking, like 2012’s blockbuster sequel The Dark Knight Rises.

At his best, Nolan can blend mainstream thrills with psychological depth, creating twisty narratives that pair complex character portraits with fast-paced, clever storytelling. 2006’s twisty mysteryThe Prestige is perhaps the best fusion of Nolan’s blockbuster sensibilities and his stranger side. A time-twisting thriller, The Prestige explores the love/hate relationship between rival stage magicians Borden and Angier, played by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman respectively. Angier’s attempts to one-up his former colleague’s infamous trademark trick result in decades of obsession, bloodshed, and eventually a surreal sci-fi atrocity that defies explanation.

The Prestige’s Unreliable Narrators Make It Impossible To Figure The Movie Out

Angier and Borden’s Complex Plot Is Hard To Decipher

At first glance, the plot twists at the end of The Prestige may seem somewhat straightforward, especially because the movie’s pair of protagonists reveal all the secrets at the end. However, the fact that The Prestige is told from the perspective of their journals, which were written by a pair of twins and countless clones (each of whom didn’t know if they were the clone or the original) means viewers can never really tell what was going on. Put simply, it turns out that Bale’s Borden pulled off The Transported Man because he was one of a pair of twins.

The two twins lived publicly as one person for their entire professional lives, even sharing love interests and raising a child together. No one, including their romantic partners, had any idea about this complex deception, which allowed Borden to seemingly teleport across a room when, in reality, one twin was simply standing in for the other. However, Hugh Jackman’s The Prestige character takes a much more convoluted, twisted route to recreate the feat. The Prestige’s ending reveals that he unlocks the secret to human cloning solely so he can kill another version of himself each time he pulls off the trick.

However, this surreal sci-fi twist prompts a slew of other questions that are never explained by the movie’s ending. For example, did the original Angier survive using the machine the first time? It is impossible for viewers to tell because we don’t know who experienced that scene. It has to have been either Angier or his first clone who drowned under the stage while the other emerged into the stunned crowd, but without knowing who wrote about the experience in their journal, the audience never discovered whether Angier was replaced by a clone each time he did the trick.

Robert Angier’s Many Clones Make The Prestige Even More Difficult To Follow

Angier’s Plan Is Vastly More Complicated Than Borden’s Simple Trick

For obvious reasons, the existence of Ahgier’s clones makes The Prestige’s story more complicated. Nolan’s movie features his best plot twist, but the revelation only works because viewers accept the existence of dozens of Angier’s clones. The question whether these clones only exist momentarily before they are killed as part of the act, or if they replace the last clone of Angier every time the act ends, is never clarified, even though this seems like a vital point.

If Angier dies every time he pulls off the movie’s central trick, Hugh Jackman’s character is arguably a lot less guilty than he seems in The Prestige’s ending. Choosing to sacrifice his own life for the sake of a magic trick is a pretty unhinged thing to do, and it is even wilder if viewers imagine that every clone Anger produces after dying in the first performance follows this same path. However, if Angier remains the same original individual, and it is only his clones who die during the trick, this leads to even more questions.

The Prestige Reveals All Of Its Tricks At The End – But It Is Still Confusing

Nolan’s Dizzying Mystery Is Intentionally Impossible To Follow

If the original Angier is killing another clone every time the performance ends, this makes it hard to understand how he convinced so many versions of himself to die. While the thriller’s plot twist is ingenious when The Prestige explains how Borden pulled off his trick, Angier’s obsessive recreation requires much more explanation than the movie provides.

Viewers can’t really track what is happening since the entire story is told by three people, or possibly two twins and countless clones, who all have good reasons to obscure the truth. Like a truly great magic trick, The Prestigs’s ending allows Christopher Nolan to provide as much explanation as the endings of Tenet and Inception while still somehow leaving viewers unsure of what exactly they just saw.