10 Movie Plot Twists That Were Hiding In Plain Sight

Twist: Borden has an identical twin brother.

Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale play Robert Angier and Alfred Borden, respectively, who worked together as apprentices for a magician, and then grow up to become rivaling magicians in turn-of-the-19thcentury London. Borden has a showstopper trick where he appears to teleport himself which Angier becomes insanely jealous of and wants to steal for himself, if only he could figure out how Borden pulls it off.

Angier is led to believe that he is using a teleportation machine invented by Nikola Tesla. Angier travels to America to meet the inventor and purchases the machine for himself, against Tesla’s warnings. The teleportation machine makes an exact copy of the object being teleported, so when Angier uses it on stage to make a copy of himself, he decides to drop the original body through a trapdoor in the stage where it falls into a tank of water and is drowned inside. Angier sees an opportunity and uses this to frame Borden for his own murder. Borden goes to jail and is executed.

Then Borden somehow shows up to Angier’s show posthumously and shoots him. This is when we discover that Borden had an identical twin brother all along and they had kept this a secret throughout their entire careers so they could someday pull off a great illusion.

Through the whole movie Borden always had a bagman or something, known as “Fallon,” who was obviously Borden wearing a disguise. Not only is the double in plain sight to the audience throughout the film, but it is also in front of Angier all along. We also get a hint from Sarah that Borden is swapping places with "Fallon" as she reveals she knows when he means it when he tells her he loves her. Some days he doesn't and it's obvious - which is clearly the days when it's not her Alfred at all.

Even as everyone insists that Borden was using a body double for the teleportation trick, Angier just can’t accept the easy answer as the truth.