20 Utterly Devastating Movie Endings No One Saw Coming
6. The Prestige
Christopher Nolan is one of the biggest directors working in the industry today, his films are typically Oscar frontrunners in any year they release, something that will probably continue through 2026 with The Odyssey, and it is rare that the man misses the mark.
Imagine not only being able to bring the greatest Batman movies of all time to the world, but in between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises release something as truly brilliant as The Prestige. It's an outstanding effort all round, but the ending does knock things up a notch.
Two competing magicians and bitter rivals, Christian Bale's Alfred Borden and Hugh Jackman's Robert Angier, battle with each other to be the greatest. The lynchpin of their rivalry is the former's Transporting Man trick, in which he swapped places with his secret twin, that the latter spent his fortune trying to replicate.
Angier ultimately managed to find a means of performing the Real Transporting Man, where, thanks to a machine built by Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), he created and immediately killed an exact copy of himself. He was able to complete the trick and remain on stage for the adoration of the audience, all the while racking up countless identical corpses in the process. Borden may not have cared about it in the end, but anyone watching would have been horrified by the reveal.