The Prestige was not Christopher Nolan's first choice for his follow-up to Batman Begins. He had originally planned to make it before Batman Begins, but the Batman project took priority and pushed it back. By the time he returned to The Prestige, he had a much larger cast at his disposal — reuniting Christian Bale and Michael Caine from Batman Begins and adding Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall, Piper Perabo, Andy Serkis, and David Bowie in a casting decision that became one of cinema's most memorable pieces of counterintuitive thinking. The film was released on October 20, 2006, in the United States and earned $109 million worldwide on a $40 million budget. It received two Academy Award nominations: Best Cinematography for Wally Pfister, who shot approximately 90 percent of the film handheld after Nolan requested a more free-form style, and Best Art Direction. The script was adapted by Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan from Christopher Priest's 1995 novel, which won the World Fantasy Award. Nolan told the cast not to read the source novel before filming — an instruction Christian Bale ignored, reading it anyway. Nolan later said he believed Bale was 'exactly right' for the part of Borden and that it was 'unthinkable' for anyone else to play it. The film is rated PG-13 and runs 2 hours and 10 minutes. Notably, 2006 also saw the release of The Illusionist, a rival period magician film — giving audiences two Victorian-era magic movies in the same year. The Prestige was the more commercially successful and critically complex of the two. The score was composed by David Julyan, Nolan's composer on Memento and The Following, who used the Shepard Tone — a technique of perpetually ascending audio illusion — in ways that prefigured Hans Zimmer's more celebrated use of it in Dunkirk.

The film's story is structured as a duel told through competing diaries, each of which the rival reads as a prisoner or a spy. Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) begins the story as a stage assistant alongside Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) under the mentorship of Cutter (Michael Caine), a stage engineer who explains to an audience of one — and to the film's viewers — that every great magic trick has three parts: the pledge (an ordinary thing shown to the audience), the turn (something extraordinary done to it), and the prestige (the return, the hardest part, the one that gets the applause). Julia McCullough (Piper Perabo) is Angier's wife, also working as an assistant. During a water tank escape act, she drowns. Borden tied her wrists with a knot that failed — though whether he used the wrong knot deliberately or accidentally is something even he cannot answer cleanly, because the question of which twin was present that night cannot be definitively resolved. Angier blames Borden and that blame launches a decade of sabotage, theft, revenge, and escalating obsession. Borden's act, 'The Transported Man,' is the trick that consumes Angier: Borden walks into a cabinet on one side of the stage and appears simultaneously at the other side, catching a ball. No wire, no trap door, no hiding place. Angier hires his own assistant, Olivia Wenscombe (Scarlett Johansson), sends her to spy on Borden, and she defects to Borden's side. Borden also has an enigmatic assistant named Fallon — a figure who is always present but barely noticed, face partially obscured, almost never speaking. Sarah (Rebecca Hall), Borden's wife, begins to sense that Borden is not the same person every day. She knows something is wrong but cannot name it. Rebecca Hall's most famous moment in the film — the line 'I know what you are' — was ad-libbed on set and kept by Nolan because it captures exactly what the film is about without explaining it. Cutter (Michael Caine) is the moral center of the film, though his moral clarity operates on incomplete information for most of the story. Nolan noted that though the character felt as if it had been written for Caine, it was written before he had ever met him. Milton the Magician, played by Ricky Jay, appears briefly as the older professional who initially employs both men.

Angier decodes Borden's encrypted diary and discovers a reference to Nikola Tesla, who had been working in Colorado Springs. Tesla, played by David Bowie in one of cinema's most improbable but precisely right casting decisions, is assisted by Mr. Alley, played by Andy Serkis — a character described by Serkis as a 'gatekeeper' and 'a mirror image of Michael Caine's character.' Tesla does not build a teleportation device. What he builds is a cloning machine: a mechanism that creates a precise physical duplicate of any object placed within it, including living persons. Angier, unable to fully understand what the machine does, uses it to stage 'The Real Transported Man' — his own rival to Borden's act. The trick works as follows: every night, Angier enters the machine, is duplicated, and one version of him walks into the audience while another falls through a trapdoor into a tank of water beneath the stage and drowns. The choice of which version lives and which dies is random. This is the film's darkest mechanical reveal, and it is given visual confirmation in the final act when Cutter and the surviving twin discover rows of water tanks beneath the theater, each containing a drowned version of Angier. To stage himself publicly as the aristocratic figure who arranges Borden's arrest and execution, Angier uses the false identity Lord Caldlow — and also employs a drunk, dissolute look-alike actor named Gerald Root, played by Hugh Jackman in a second role, to serve as a decoy in the eyes of the public. The fact that Jackman is playing both the obsessive genius and his bumbling stand-in is one of the film's quietest structural jokes, operating in the background of scenes the audience barely has time to question.

The revelation about Borden is the film's second great secret, and it reconfigures every scene. Borden is not one man. He is two identical twins — brothers who shared a single identity so completely that they both lived as 'Alfred Borden,' alternating the role with the other disguised as Fallon, their stage engineer. They used prosthetics and makeup to make Fallon look sufficiently different, and when one twin was Borden, the other was Fallon. To maintain physical consistency — after one twin lost a finger during a stage accident — both brothers cut off the same finger so that their hands matched regardless of which twin was visible. The personal cost is expressed through what each twin loved. One brother loved Sarah — and it was he who was hanged after being framed for Angier's 'murder' (one of Angier's clones). The other loved Olivia. Sarah, who could sense that the man she married was not the same person every day, eventually hangs herself — unable to survive the emotional instability of a love that was only real half the time. The brother who loved Sarah died for Borden; the one who loved Olivia survived to reveal the truth to the dying Angier. Cutter, who had helped Angier frame Borden, finally understands the full picture too late — he had believed Angier's framing of events and participated in an execution based on a constructed lie. The film ends in devastation for both rivals: Angier killed by a hundred versions of himself, Borden losing his brother and his wife to a secret they maintained for the sake of a stage trick. The prestige of the title was never the machine or the applause — it was the price neither man understood he was paying until it was already spent.