Spoilers, eh? I'm always inclined to get a little impatient with people who make too much of a fuss about spoilers, as if narrative causality is the only reason you read a book or see a film. I mean, we still all went to see the Star Wars prequels even though they were crap we knew that Anakin dude wasn't going to wind up opening a sanctuary for lost Wookies. Romeo and Juliet loses none its impact (and, in fact, gains much of its tragedy) from knowing the outcome in advance. Yes, I know these are specific examples but you have to find equally specific examples to discover things that are truly damaged by knowing something of the outcome. The Prestige, then, would be one of those. So this review is likely to be brief.

Therefore, in brief: Victorian London, two stage magicians, feud. Well, there's slightly more to it than but to go any further into the dense twists and turns of this almost unforgivingly complex story would be to spoil the pleasure of watching it slowly unravel and evade you. In fact, the plot is both the film's strength and its weakness. Despite excellent performances from Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale and Michael Caine and a glorious, film-stealing cameo from David Bowie, the driving emotions are always the same - revenge, hatred, envy - and the action swings with the same relentless inevitability of a pendulum from one magician's revenge to the next magician's attempt. This doesn't exactly make for comfortable or emotionally engaging viewing. And, for a film with such a lot going on, it moves rather slowly. This isn't a criticism, as such, but it does mean that the film is unremittingly dark; and the preoccupation with obsession and vengeance coupled with the measured pace means the experience of watching it is more akin to reading Moby Dick than the average cinema-goer might be prepared to countenance.

What little sense we get of the characters must be down to the talents of Jackman and Bale, because they are barely sketched beyond some superficial differences of presentation, for example Bale's lower-class accent is set against Jackman's colonial polish. Scarlett Johanson adds another to her collection of films in which she does bog-all beyond looking beautiful but since my estimation of her ability to act has gone down considerably since I first admired in Lost in Translation and Girl with a Pearl Earring I cannot really consider this a problem. She walks around in a series of beautiful corsets, but that's about it. Rebecca Hall is marginally more satisfying but is still prevented from providing any sort of compelling incentive for Christian Bale's character to stop with the vendetta already.

Despite being emotionally hollow, the film is nevertheless so intellectually engaging and suitably adorned with visual and atmosphere flair that it barely detracts. Particularly striking is the portrayal of stage magic; within about ten minutes of screen time I was terrified of it. The complexities of the plot are deftly handled and the film unfolds in a series of tightly controlled meta-narratives. Even though I failed miserably to pick up any of them, there are enough clues scattered throughout the film that the denouncement feels both plausible and dramatically satisfying. And it's wonderfully, hauntingly macabre.

It may not be a film to watch twice, but it's certainly a film to be seen once.