Read more: Christopther Nolan’s Interstellar is a Secular End Times Myth Starved of this information and context, the audience’s most logical assumption would be that they are being shown two contrasting illusions: one that is executed successfully, and one that has gone tragically (or nefariously) wrong.
At this point, the secret to performing the birdcage trick has yet to be revealed, and the nature of Angier’s illusion is several reels away. It’s a deliberately confusing way to start the film. It’s only when we get to the respective finales that the illusions seemingly deviate: Cutter’s bird is made to successfully reappear, delighting the little girl, but Angier seemingly falls to his doom into a water tank, and begins to drown. Caine’s voiceover explains the three acts of a magic trick – the pledge, the turn and the prestige – that the simultaneously unfolding performances serve to visually illustrate. It’s intercut with moments from a climactic sequence in the movie where Hugh Jackman’s character Angier performs his own remarkable illusion. The first time we see it performed is right at the beginning of the film Michael Caine’s magic engineer Cutter is performing it for a little girl. The film enjoys playing with metaphor – as does, I believe, the adapted novel by Christopher Priest (I haven’t read it, so these thoughts are based purely on the film) – and the birdcage illusion is the most prominent example, given the frequency of its appearance and the way it mirrors at least two crucial plot points. Let’s start with one of the more subtle examples of the film’s confessional bent – the birdcage illusion. It’s only through tricky editing, intercutting timelines and our own expectations that such transparency is obfuscated to the extent that the eventual reveals – at least for me – were genuinely surprising. An accumulation of metaphor, foreshadowing and characters plainly and simply speaking aloud the answers, The Prestige is unrelenting in the various ways it divulges solutions to its mysteries.
I say ‘hiding’, but the first thing that hits you upon re-watching the film is how honest it is with the audience regarding its various ambiguities and twists. In fact, you could argue that you only truly understand the characters, their motivations and the emotional journeys they take, when you know all the secrets the film has been hiding in plain sight. For while there are certainly mysteries to unwrap upon first viewing, watching through it again armed with foreknowledge does so much more than tickle the ‘oh, so that’s why so-and-so did such-and-such’ part of your brain.
Unfairly thought of by some at the time as a stylish ‘twist’ movie in the vein of early Shyamalan, such a description does the film a great disservice.
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