A man holding a rubber ball stands before a crowded audience. He bounces it purposefully, almost smug in his certainty he is about to show you something which will astonish you. He pauses in front of a door, a door seemingly to nowhere, looking back across the stage towards its twin.

“Are you watching closely?” he asks coyly. With a smile and a flash of movement, he disappears behind the façade hurling the ball down the stage as he does so, almost instantaneously reemerging on through the other door catching it with a chuckle before the rubber sphere goes bouncing off the stage.

It is a trick, of course, but just what kind of trick your guess is as good as mine. But that’s the world in which magicians like Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) live. Theirs is a realm of slight of hand and illusionary misdirection, a path to greatness embarked upon by a select few and where true glory comes to only the most singularly talented of them. It is a competition where one fantastic trick deserves another, a journey of one-upmanship swathed in both honor and secrecy, where the only thing worse than stealing a trick is revealing its workings to an always questioning public.

This is “The Prestige,” writer/director Christopher Nolan’s eagerly anticipated follow up to “Batman Begins” and based on the acclaimed novel by Christopher Priest. Working from a screenplay co-written by his brother Jonathan that is even more layered and complex then the duo’s classic script for “Memento,” this movie is a giant puzzle taking intense concentration and absolute attention to detail to unravel. It is a remarkably well acted masterwork, bristling with suspense and intrigue rewarding intelligent viewers with sights, sounds, twists and turns they’ll take with them long after the theater curtain closes.

But how close it stays to their bosom days later will probably depend on how willing they are to forgive how cold and heartless much of the proceedings are. This is an unquestionably frigid motion picture, nearly as icy as one of the central mountain top locales much of the mystery takes place at. These two men at the center of all of this are calculating obsessives, former friends now driven to frantic dementia by the competitive rivalry that comes to define their lives. These are not good/bad or black/white sort of guys, instead the two men straddling a labyrinthine gray area where truth or lie depends entirely on a person’s constantly wavering point of view.

Granted, Angier’s fury towards Borden is at least understandable. The latter’s mistake may have been the reason the former’s wife Julia (Piper Perabo) lost her life in a magical trick gone tragically wrong. It is no secret, then, why Angier loathes his competitor so completely, and yet his fixation on unraveling the man’s greatest trick borders on insanity. Sending his beautiful assistant Olivia (Scarlett Johansson) – a woman who has grown to love him passionately – to work for Borden in order to steal his secrets, dismissing his longtime friend and ingeneur (an inventor of magic tricks) Cutter (an absolutely wonderful Michael Caine) in a drunken rage, traveling all the way from London to Colorado Springs to visit an electrical scientist many label a madman, there is apparently no limit to what Angier will do to unseat and dismiss his rival.

Borden, on the other hand, is his own eccentric enigma. One moment he is driven to despair over what happened to Julia, the next he’s callously manipulating all those around him to create a brilliantly different illusion. He can be spectacularly romantic with his new wife Sarah (Rebecca Hall) for an entire day while the following morning he is so consumed with making Angier look like a fool it is almost as if he hates the woman for being a distraction. He is his own cryptogram, a bizarre egomaniac at once both compassionate and contemptuous all at the same time. Most of all he is a man of extreme pride, a figure so sure of his own brilliance his inability to allow another a moment of intimacy or triumph could very well be his undoing.

Frankly, these two actors are borderline spectacular. One moment you adore Jackman, hunger for him to be the hero and lustily cheer on his quest to unseat Borden. The next you hate and despise him with all the passion of an angry mob out for the head of vicious mass murder. At the same time, Bale makes you hunger for his blood, his indifference to the death of Julia or the welfare of his wife so unforgivable you’d be forgiven for wanting to see him hanged. But then, almost seconds later, his compassion for Sarah almost overwhelms you, while his overpowering love for his beautiful young daughter even at the darkest hour of them all is enough to bring you to sobbing oceans of all encompassing tears.

Both actors dive into their roles with relish and gusto. They do not care that both hold traits bordering on the despicable. They do not shy away from the demons haunting each magician as they punch and jab and bob and weave at the career being forged by the other. They do not give these men idiosyncratic quirks that could soften their rougher edges and make them cuddlier then they actually are. Jackman and Bale are phenomenal, delivering three-dimensional beings so electric and alive I almost felt I could have reached through the screen and shook their hands had either been open or willing to let me touch it.

But this does not make things easy for an audience. Not only do viewers have to deal with a plot bordering on the indecipherable (although, as long as you’re observant you shouldn’t have that much difficulty keeping track of what is going on), they also have to contend with two main characters with as many, if not more, character flaws and baleful characteristics as they do. A person’s emotions are torn between both men, rooting for one and hating the other one moment only to have the rug tossed out from underneath them and discovering they should have been pulling for the other the entire time.

Or should they? It’s hard to tell in Nolan’s impressionistic epic, and by the time was all said and done I wasn’t completely sure I knew myself if I’d chosen to give my feelings of endearment to the right man. But then that is the beauty of the piece. The filmmaker never lets you get your bearings, keeps you on your toes start to finish, makes you question the goings on in each and every corner of the frame. His handling of it all borders on the magnificent, the finished product nearly as wondrous and spectacular as “Memento” or “Batman Begins.”

Emphasis on the nearly. “The Prestige” is quite long, nearly two-and-a-half hours, and sometimes the director feels the need to cram in more information and complexities than we probably need. Also, much like his debut picture “Following,” some of the tangents here don’t hold together very well when pondered afterwards, some of the strings tying all of the varying puzzle pieces together unfortunately fraying a bit as they dangle precipitously in front of an audience’s glare.

No matter. For me this picture is a richer, more satisfying meal than any I almost could have dreamed of. It is darker, more complex, filled with meatier emotions than the “The Illusionist,” and for those who haven’t seen either and feel the need to choose between one or the other this is certainly the film I would suggest they pick. Quite simply it is a better picture, and while it doesn’t offer the sensitivity or playful romantic escapism of the other, Nolan’s certainly makes up for its absence with a story pulsating with the suspense, excitement and genuine intrigue the other most certainly lacks.

Cutter calls The Prestige the most important aspect of a magic trick, the final moment where you see “twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you’ve never seen before.” He could have been talking about this movie, because in a year of so many retreads and also-rans, where much of what’s hit the multiplex looks exactly like what was there just last month, “The Prestige” offers entertainment and wonderment unlike anything else this Fall. While that might not be a thing we haven’t seen before, it’s certainly shocking, and if that’s not worthy of rousing applause than I don’t know what else is.

Film Rating: êêê1/2  (out of 4)