“The Prestige”, the latest film from English director Christopher Nolan, sees Nolan paired up again with his lead from Batman Begins, Christian Bale. Set in 1800's London,  “The Prestige” tells the tale of two magicians, Alfred Borden (Bale), and Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman) who, driven by the desire to one-up each other, will stop at nothing. This obsession takes over both men and grows from an initial professional rivalry into an all-encompassing battle that takes over their lives. Nolan takes his ambitious, tightly-wound script (co-written with his brother Jonathan), and fiery performances from Bale and Jackman to deliver the kind of suspenseful and unconventional psychological thriller that we have come to expect from this talented young director.

Using the non-chronological sequence that has become his trademark, Nolan begins the film near the end, with Michael Caine's fatherly Cockney voice-over introducing the viewer to the world of magic, and the three parts of a successful illusion: the initial “pledge” to the audience, the “turn” from reality to the extraordinary, and finally the titular “prestige,” when what has disappeared is brought back by the magician. This is played while Angier performs his final trick, a teleporting act enabled by an unwieldy electrical apparatus. However, the trick goes horribly wrong and we see the magician drown, desperately trying to escape as another man looks on. This man, we learn, is Alfred Borden. The rest of the film is spent piecing together the events that lead to his conviction for the murder of Angier and his subsequent time in jail waiting to be hanged. All the while, he is being offered a sum to sell the secret to his most celebrated trick, the Transported Man, to save his daughter.

The film jumps backwards, first to Angier heading to Colorado for a yet unknown reason, and then to the magician's humble beginnings as “volunteers” for another magician's act, a water tank escape act performed by an assistant (who we find out is Angier's wife). The film cuts between the development of these two budding magicians, with such sequences as Angier choosing his stage name, their attempt at stealing a Chinese magician's trick, and a little boy crying, thinking that Bale has killed the bird when he makes a bird disappear. Indeed, the bird has been killed, which the film neatly euphemizes as “getting your hands dirty,” an accurate description for the events that follow.

The first tragedy eventually strikes when Angier's wife drowns; the seeds of conflict are thus sown as Bale is blamed for tying the knot around her wrists incorrectly, preventing her from escaping. Bale becomes increasingly alienated from Angier and Cutter (Caine) after this episode, and we begin to see the increasingly violent methods each uses to sabotage the other. Angier shoots Borden when he performs, so Borden snares Angier's hand in a collapsing bird cage and breaks Angier's leg. There is an element of humor in all this as the two use some ridiculous and useless disguises to get past the other's notice. In the centre of this hostility is Angier's assistant-cum-lover Olivia Wenscombe (Scarlett Johansson) who fuels the jealousy by abandoning Angier to eventually become Borden's mistress. She puts in a solid performance, as does Rebecca Hall as Sarah, Borden's increasingly put-upon wife, and Caine as Angier's backstage manager and mentor.

Borden eventually goes out on his own to invent his “greatest trick,” the Transported Man, which gives him an upper hand over Angier. Thus begins Angier's obsession with discovering the “secret” to the trick, the McGuffin which drives the bulk of the film. David Bowie is fairly low-key, if a bit wooden in a cameo as inventor Nikola Tesla, whom Angier goes to visit to find this secret, while Andy Serkis shines as Tesla's wily assistant Alley, simultaneously luring and misleading Angier. These scenes in Colorado distract from the action in London and are fairly incoherent with their pseudoscientific gobbledygook, but Nolan manages to keep this portion effective by cutting in scenes of Bale to contrast the two magicians' intense but differing personalities: Angier obsessive and relentless, Borden charming but troubled. The film builds to a powerful climax, with the magicians risking everything to get the last word, but Nolan concludes with a contrived twist that doesn't make complete sense, in order to tidy up the film instead of leaving it ambiguous.

Despite this, “The Prestige” still holds up as a satisfying thriller. Nolan occasionally overreaches with his cerebral script, but never loses track of the feud central to the film. Bale and Jackman live up to their end of the bargain, keeping the audience glued to the screen with exceptional performances and explosive chemistry which, together with a solid supporting cast carry the story and make it into a compelling spectacle, much like one of its breathtaking illusions.