The Prestige Ending (& All Twists) Explained

While The Prestige was well-received by fans and critics when it was released in 2006, its ending can be challenging to fully grasp. However, once the ending of The Prestige is explained it ties the sometimes-confusing movie together perfectly — and it exposes the core themes of the story in a way few films since have matched. The Prestige, based on a novel of the same name, follows two rival magicians in London named Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) who quickly descend into murky areas of morality in a bid to outdo each other’s escalating magic tricks. Director Christopher Nolan delivers his typically sharp intellect to the narrative of The Prestige, leaving a lot to unpack by the twist-filled ending.

The story of The Prestige is one of obsession, sacrifice, and the dangers of pursuing perfection. After Angier blames Borden for the tragic death of his wife, the two men become sworn enemies locked in a deadly competition to pull off the ultimate illusion, known as The Transported Man. The Prestige‘s narrative is imbued with historical references that flesh out its dazzling late 19th-century setting, including a fateful meeting with the iconic Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) who sets Angier and Borden’s machinations in motion. Just like a great magic trick, The Prestige requires you to watch closely. The film is packed with sleight-of-hand tricks, complicated science, and mistaken identities that combine to create a masterful movie wrapped up in a harrowing finale.

Related: 10 Subtle Clues About The Twist Ending In The Prestige

The Prestige’s Final Scene Explained

The ending of The Prestige is incredibly shocking, especially the final scene, and the twist is delivered in a way that perfectly mirrors a magic trick. The Prestige‘s opening monologue by Christopher Nolan regular Michael Caine describes the three acts of a magic trick, while also cleverly foreshadowing the structure of the film. The first act of a trick, the pledge, shows you something ordinary. The second act, the turn, makes it do something extraordinary, such as disappearing. The third act is called the prestige: it brings back the object — or in this case, person — that disappears.

The Prestige‘s final scene shows how both men pulled off their own prestige, as all is revealed when the surviving Borden twin shoots Angier. Angier immediately realizes Borden is actually two people, the twins Alfred and Fallon Borden (who both live as Alfred). This is how Borden has been performing The Transported Man trick. However, with his dying breaths, Angier reveals his own secret, and it’s far darker. Angier perfected The Transported Man with the help of Nikola Tesla, and it is achieved with teleportation — or so it appears.

In actuality, Angier isn’t teleported, but duplicated. He falls below the stage into a tank of water where he drowns. The new, duplicate Angier manifests somewhere off-stage, revealing themselves to the audience to create the illusion that he’s teleported. The truth, as The Prestige ending explained albeit loosely, is that the original Angier dies, and the duplicate assumes their life until the next time the trick is performed (when the duplicate dies and is in turn replaced). Angier so desperately wanted to be the best and dazzle his audience that he sacrificed himself to do so. Because of the horrific cycle set in place by his trick, it is revealed that it is not the original Angier standing in front of Borden. The real Angier, the one that the Borden twins knew, died the first time he pulled off The Transported Man.

The Prestige‘s final moments loop back to the opening scene, in which Cutter breaks down a magic trick for a little girl. Only now, audiences realize it is Borden’s daughter Jess, and Cutter agreed to safely keep watch over her because he grew disgusted with Angier’s dangerous obsession. Borden’s reunion with his daughter is intercut with his discovery of the dead Angier clones and his horror at what he sees. His love of magic is grounded in the craft itself, not the glory as it was for Angier, and therefore walking away with his daughter signifies that he is happily leaving magic behind him.

How Angier & Borden’s Transported Man Tricks Work

Borden and Angier both master a trick called The Transported Man, in which the magician appears to travel between two wardrobes on opposite ends of the stage, almost instantly. The film’s final act reveals each man’s outlandish take on the trick, with Borden mastering The Transported Man first with a sleight-of-hand strategy. The ending of the film reveals that the identity of Borden is actually assumed by twin brothers.

On stage, one brother is located in each wardrobe. They take the deception so seriously that, when one brother loses a couple of fingers from a gunshot wound, the other cuts off his fingers to match. In essence, there is nothing flashy about Borden’s approach here — the trick is grounded and straight to the point, backed up by the Borden twins’ painstaking approach to detail.On the other hand, Angier’s mission to master The Transported Man takes him stateside to meet the famed inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla. He believes that Tesla built a transportation machine for Borden – a belief that quickly turns out to be false – but Tesla still manages to build a transportation machine for Angier.

This machine duplicates any object or living being placed inside and drops the copy a short distance away, meaning each time the trick is performed, Angier is cloned. This means the original Angier falls through a trap door into a water tank and drowns each time the trick is performed, with the new duplicate appearing somewhere in the theater to delight Angier’s audiences. The trick, or more accurately Faustian-style bargain, is what finally earns Angier the audience’s adoration, the thing he’d been obsessively seeking for so long.

Who Borden & Fallon Really Are

In short, Alfred and Fallon Borden don’t technically exist, instead acting as two separate identities taken on by a set of twin brothers. As one brother says in the film, they live two halves of a full life. They’re so dedicated to this craft that they each sacrifice a potentially well-rounded life in order to succeed in their chosen career. To keep up with the ruse successfully pulling off The Transported Man, each twin takes turns alternately playing Borden and his stage engineer and right-hand man Fallon.

Each brother lives different lives when portraying Alfred. One is madly in love with Sarah, the woman with whom they marry and have a child with. The other is in love with their assistant Olivia (Scarlett Johansson) and treats Sarah cruelly. Borden’s wildly contradictory behavior actually clues in Sarah to the fact that he is two people. When one twin is wrongfully tried and hanged for the assumed death of Angier, his rival believes he’s finally beaten Borden once and for all.

This is not the case when the surviving twin finds and fatally shoots Angier, as both he and the audience realize that Borden successfully pulled off The Transported Man for years by being one half of a set of twin brothers. In essence, Angier was so caught up with the big picture that he failed to look for one of the most obvious answers, mirroring the audience’s confusing journey through Christopher Nolan’s film.

The Prestige Timeline Explained

Nolan’s obsession with time isn’t in The Prestige as much as his other movies but it does jump around in time in non-linear fashion. The story is told in a loop, spanning at least a decade and never moving in completely chronological order. The Prestige actually starts at the end of the story, as the opening scene is taken from various moments in the final act. Audiences see Borden witness Angier’s apparent death, intercut with stage engineer John Cutter (Michael Caine) describing a magic trick to a little girl. Immediately after the opening scene, the film jumps back in time for at least a decade to begin the story of Angier’s downfall.

In the earliest segment in the flashback, audiences meet Borden and Angier before they are accomplished magicians, with the two men working together as plants in another magician’s show. When Borden makes a mistake that costs Angier’s wife her life, however, the events of The Prestige are truly set in motion. Once Julia (Piper Perabo) dies, the men are torn apart and go their own separate ways. From there, the film chronicles each magician beginning his career and moving on to the next phase of his life.

Borden meets and falls in love with a woman named Sarah (Rebecca Hall), and they have a little girl named Jess (Samantha Mahurin). He also develops a wildly successful trick called The Transported Man in contrast with Angier, who now lives in the shadow of Borden’s success. Offstage, Angier is consumed by his obsession with learning the secret to Borden’s trick, laying the foundation for The Prestige‘s macabre finale to unfold.

Years pass, and Angier eventually perfects The Transported Man, with Borden arriving at one of his shows to witness it. He sneaks backstage and appears to witness Angier die performing the trick, mirroring the sequence shown at the beginning of the film, before it’s assumed that Borden is responsible, and he is arrested for Angier’s apparent murder. Once The Prestige timeline catches up to Borden in jail, the film moves in chronological order as the secret to both men’s tricks are eventually revealed. The film ends with Cutter describing the fateful Transported Man magic trick to a little girl, who audiences now know to be Borden’s daughter Jess.

How The Ending Of The Prestige Highlights Its Core Themes

Like all Christopher Nolan movies, The Prestige has many themes running throughout. While it’s a story about rival magicians, Nikola Tesla-based sci-fi teleportation, and the world of 19th-century stage magic, it’s more a movie that examines human emotion. The Prestige is a movie about obsession, jealousy, and the dangers of chasing perfection. It’s also a story about sacrifice and questions where the limit is to how far an entertainer should be prepared to go for their art. The ending of The Prestige ties all of these themes together — a fact that can get lost amidst the spectacle of seeing a tank full of dead Angier duplicates and learning that Alfred Borden has been two people throughout the movie.

These themes are obvious when looking at Angier’s ending. He literally sacrificed himself over and over again for the sake of pulling off a single magic trick. His obsession with besting Borden was so strong that an endless string of Angier duplicates were willing to live fleeting lives, many barely lasting a day if shows were close together. The fact that the original Angier ended his own life to pull off The Transported Man is one thing, but for each Angier duplicate to be willing to do it ad infinitum speaks for how deep his obsession truly is. At no point did an Angier clone decide that the sacrifice wasn’t worth it, even after dozens had died.

The reveal that Borden is actually two people living a single life is where The Prestige ending truly shows its hand when it comes to the core themes of the Christopher Nolan movie. The twist is a commentary on the double lives that artists and entertainers often lead as a result of their pursuit of perfecting their craft. Borden may be literally two people, but the parallels are obvious. Since the Borden twins had been sharing a double life since long before the start of The Prestige, it’s clear that their obsession with stage magic and performance takes precedence over anything else. They were already trapped in the spiral of obsession and had sacrificed any semblance of a normal life to achieve it — the contest with Angier in The Prestige simply provided them with a focus.

What The Prestige’s Ending Reveals About Art

The Prestige‘s final shot, of Borden finding dozens of dead Angier clones and then reuniting with his daughter, speaks volumes to the inordinate amounts of humanity each man gave up for magic. Borden lost a brother and maimed his own body, and Angier ended up sacrificing his own life. They both did whatever it took to come out on top, but their driving motivations are what set them apart.

In his final monologue, Angier reveals his motivation was always his audience. The world can be a hard and terrible place, so if Angier could provide his audiences with just one moment of amazement, he could count himself as a success. Yet he could only be the one providing that moment if he was the best. Angier is shown time and again to be willing to sacrifice absolutely anything if it meant he could provide his audiences with that moment.

While it can be argued Borden still harbored a dangerous obsession with beating Angier, it is undeniable that Borden was in the magical profession simply for the craft. Magic comes naturally for Borden, whereas Angier literally had to sacrifice himself in order to succeed. By the film’s end, Borden is able to pursue magic and live a full life with his daughter while admitting that he will never be considered “the best”. This contrasts with Angier, who went out on top but died innumerable horrific deaths in order to reach his pinnacle. At its core, therefore, the question that The Prestige poses is this: should art be for the love of the craft or for those who get to enjoy it?

Why The Prestige Ending Is Christopher Nolan’s Most Shocking

The Prestige ending packs a punch that stands above all of Christopher Nolan’s memorable movie endings. Nolan has excelled at ending his movies on a high note. His Dark Knight trilogy, for example, featured three jaw-dropping conclusions: the Joker tease in Batman Begins, the epic sacrifice of Batman in The Dark Knight, and the hint of the Batman mantle being passed on in The Dark Knight Rises. While these endings go down in superhero movie history, they are far from Nolan’s most shocking. While The Prestige holds this crown, it has some strong contenders from Nolan’s filmography.

With Nolan’s breakout movie, Memento, he showed how he could knock audiences down with a final twist. The revelation about Leonard’s (Guy Pearce) mission puts the entire movie into a new context that makes audiences want to go back and watch it again immediately. Inception delivers an ending that makes the audience theorize and speculate years after it is over. However, The Prestige may be the crowning jewel of Nolan’s movie finales as it does both. It offers a twist that changes the entire movie but then has audiences wondering what was real and what wasn’t in what they just saw. As talented as Nolan clearly is with ending his movies on a satisfying-yet-shocking note, he may never top The Prestige.