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The Prestige looks like a period piece about Victorian magicians, but it's actually a psychological thriller about obsession consuming two men until there's nothing left of who they used to be. This is Nolan at his most emotionally brutal, wrapping devastating human cost in the mechanics of illusion.

Watching The Prestige feels like being the audience to a magic trick that you desperately want to figure out, except the trick is two lives destroying each other in real time. The film builds a mounting sense of dread as you realize that neither man can stop, even when the cost becomes unbearable. It's intellectually engaging but emotionally punishing—you're complicit in wanting to see how far they'll go.

The weight comes from watching brilliant people make increasingly terrible choices in service of something that stopped mattering long ago. Every revelation makes their obsession feel more tragic, not more justified. The film doesn't just show you the trick—it shows you why the trick was never worth it.

Anyone who's experienced obsession that cost them relationships will recognize the emotional logic here, even when the plot becomes fantastical.