The Prestige (Film Analysis)

Annabelle Chia
Jul 25, 2020
4 min read

Updated: Jul 26, 2020

The Prestige is a psychological thriller film directed by Christopher Nolan and released in 2006. The story revolved in 1890s London around two rival stage magicians, Robert Angier played by Hugh Jackman and Alfred Borden played by Christian Bale. Both of them are obsessed with creating the best stage illusions that are better than each other and they gain a feeling of superiority over each other through that process. Unfortunately, their competitive behavior to find each other’s secret for their magic tricks lead to fatal results for both of them.

As a psychological thriller film, Nolan uses cinematic misdirection and manipulates the audiences by using psychological narratives in a thrilling setting. In this film, techniques such as plot twist and red herring which are widely used in psychological thriller films are implemented. The psychological element of this film is making use of human nature of guessing what’s going to happen next. When watching a film, we will constantly predict what’s going to happen in the next scene and although some of the scenes in The Prestige are predictable, the film still throws a plot twist at the end revealing that Borden actually has a twin brother Fallon which he shares his life with. The second technique is red herring which is a way to mislead or distract the audience from a relevant or important matter. “Alfred Borden” is a pair of identical twins who share their identities, when one is Borden, the other will be Fallon. In the film, Borden narrates ‘both of us’ several times through his diary that he used to trick Angier. The ‘both of us’ actually meant Borden and Fallon instead of Borden and Angier. By misleading audiences with red herring, the audience focuses on the relationship between Borden and Angier’s fight of who will be the best magician instead of how Borden achieves his trick by using a body double.

The story begins with narration of the three acts of every magic trick by John Cutter, the mentor of Angier and Borden played by Michael Caine. The three acts consist of the pledge, the turn and the prestige. The pledge is the most ordinary base of the trick, the turn is the process of changing the ordinary into something extraordinary and lastly the prestige shows the unexpected of the extraordinary. The film is presented through flashback, in the first scene, the prestige of the whole story is shown throughout Cutter’s narration and slowly unfolds the pledge and the turn. Other than that, there are several plots running parallel at the same time in this film through Angier and Borden’s narration of their diary. At first, Angier and Borden are both under the mentorship of Cutter but they become enemies when Borden makes a mistake and causes a tragedy in one performance. They sabotage each other’s show and read each other’s diary in order to discover their secrets and realize both the diaries were just created to fool each other. The suspense is built up by Angier buying a cloning machine from Nicola Tesla to perform The New Transported Man trick that Borden created. In order to entrap Borden to discover his secret, he makes his clone die every time he performs this trick. Borden is caught in one of the performance but he can’t prove his innocence so he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Cutter later discovers that Angier is alive and is disgusted at his plan of putting Borden into the prison and taking away his daughter also foreshadows that he will help the surviving twin. The surviving twin killed Angier at the end and told him the truth that they were actually identical twins.

The concept of this film is duality as well as sacrifices is necessary for success. Borden had a twin brother and in order to display a perfect Transported Man trick, they share their identities because they think the secret of a trick is exquisite so they hide it from everyone including Borden’s wife Sarah and his mistress Olivia. However, the twin brother loves different people, the unrestrained brother loves Olivia while the steady brother loves Sarah. The implication of their fickle and contradictory attitude towards them also caused Sarah to commit suicide and Olivia to leave because they can’t take how different Borden treated them every day. In this film, the concept of duality can also be seen in a lot of aspects. The story focuses on two magicians and each of them have their own body double, Gerald Root for Angier and Fallon for Borden. Besides the two body doubles, two diaries were also used to deceive the two magicians. Furthermore, Angier’s wife drowned in a water tank whereas Angier’s clones drowned in water tanks and Borden is blamed in both cases. Borden’s wife Sarah hangs herself and Borden himself is hanged for the charge of killing Angier.

The cinematographer uses a lot of medium shots and handheld shots to engage the audience. Moreover, the cinematographer also uses shoulder-level pan shots when the characters are having conversation or arguments. The color tone used in this film is dark colors, primarily brown color as shown in Image 1, Image 2 and Image 3. Releasing vigor, stability, and intelligence, the color brown also symbolizes the characters remain loyal to their principles, ensuring that they don't lose sight of who they are and what they want which matches the film. Borden and Angier have distinct beliefs in their career as magicians but they hold on to it until the end.

In a nutshell, this is indeed a great film even though in the end greed take away both men’s lives and none of them win.

Image 1: A color code of every frame in The Prestige squished together.