'The Prestige' (PG-13)(out of four)

Midway through director Christopher Nolan's enigmatic, addicting "The Prestige," a magician's manager finds himself overwhelmed by a mind-boggling illusion but critical of the performance of the illusion.

Slower, he tells the magician, slower so the audience has a moment to question its authenticity.

In a roundabout way, this is the theme of "The Prestige" -- the reason for its very name. Magic must not simply happen, we're told, but must evolve as a three-point curve, moving from the ordinary to the extraordinary to the unexplainable. Skip any of those steps, and the audience is not swept up in the euphoria of the surprise, but rather terrified by the inconceivable.

There must be a hint, this manager says, just a whiff of a mystery that, if we really wanted to, we could solve the trick . That's why magic is not the act of mystifying, but the act of fooling an audience that, deep down, wants to be fooled. And for the most part -- until Nolan takes the premise a bit too far -- that's what "The Prestige" itself resembles: A magic trick that starts in the realm of the realistic but takes a turn into another dimension as obsession leads two men down a dangerous path of self-destruction.

The story starts early in their career in turn-of-the-century London, as these men work for another magician. The routine works like this: The magician asks for volunteers, these men raise their hands and come up on stage and then tie up Robert's (Hugh Jackman) wife -- the magician's assistant -- so she can be dropped into a tank of water.

Even with this small role, they are both arrogant, both claiming to know the right kinds of knots to use so that the woman can easily slip the rope from her hands. But Alfred (Christian Bale) refuses to listen to Robert, ties the knot his own way, and when tragedy ensues, the men become enemies for life.

Moving forward with their own careers, each seeks revenge against the other. Robert injures Alfred during one of his gun tricks and Alfred sabotages Robert's transformation trick, one forms a new trick and the other tries to deconstruct it, copy it, and expose the other as a fraud.

Back and forth they go in an obsessive cycle until the game of professional sabotage becomes a more intense game of life and death.

Nolan handles this convoluted setup with style, much as he did with the zigzagging time scheme of his brilliant "Memento." At one point, in fact, time is jumping forward and backward in "The Prestige" on five different levels in a maze of time, emotions, ethics and science.

Eventually, the movie's moralistic questions -- about forgiveness, about revenge, about one-upsmanship -- trump the more literal twists that come one after another as both men try to perfect their magic.

After all, does it really matter who's right or who's wrong, who wins or who loses, when the more fascinating debate concerns this passionate back-and-forth, these double and triple-crosses?

Late in the film, Robert's manager (Michael Caine) looks to him and says that the media has called him one of London's finest performers. Not just a magician, he emphasizes, but performer.

Well, as we plunge deeper into this dark and mysterious world, "The Prestige" becomes a great drama. Not just a thriller with a series of magical gimmicks and surprises, but a great drama of obsessed characters at the edge of their sanity -- one that finally stalls from too many surprises and revelations, from two or three too many reveals.

As any good magician should know, leave 'em wanting more.