Note: this article contains spoilers for The Prestige (2006), Arrival (2016) and Funny Games (1997 & 2007).

The opening shot of Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film The Prestige is an answer to a question we don’t yet know we should be asking: a slow fade in opens on a dew-stained forest floor strewn with black top hats. The scene, beset by the almost palpable scent of fresh rain, bears a sense of something spectral: it’s as if the owners of the hats had suddenly vanished into thin air, leaving their headpieces in their wake. And then the title card looms in, superimposed over the scene. 

The Prestige follows two illusionists, Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman). They begin the film as onstage partners, before a significant tragedy drives a wedge between them and sets off a gradually escalating series of trick-turnings and double crossings, each at the other’s expense. “The Prestige” refers both to the title of the film itself, and to the third and final component of any magician’s trick, as explained by illusionist John Cutter (Michael Caine) via voiceover. It is the component that involves bringing a disappeared object back, thus consolidating the audience’s belief in the trick itself.

Many films have used their cinematographic language to self-reflexively comment on what their images are expressing—Nolan himself is known for his self-reflexive, metatextual narratives (see Memento (2000); Inception (2010)). And it is no coincidence that Nolan’s established three-step process of trick-turning resembles that of a traditional three-act narrative structure. Throughout the film, the performances of the two illusionists, their sleights of hand and evasive maneuvers, serve as an allegory for Nolan’s cinematographic technique, one that conceals its plot twists and narrative turns behind a smokescreen of spectacle and showmanship. By the time several narrative arcs are resolved—from Borden’s secret twin, to the casualties of Angier’s cloning device—we realise that the truth has been hiding in plain sight all along. While much of the film revolves around the construction of tricks and illusions meant to deceive an audience, we as the viewers have been just as royally fooled. 

Some of the most important films I’ve ever seen are ones that feel immersive, to the point that you forget you’re watching a series of spliced images and scenes, combined from any number of repeated takes. Instead, they feel like incarnations of another new world, feel dreamlike and hypnotic in their execution. By revealing the wizard—or rather, the illusionist—behind the curtain in The Prestige, Nolan forces us as viewers to question the assumptions we make about narrative construction, about the images we are being shown on-screen, and whether we know what those images truly mean. 

Many other films have been able to create a similarly metatheatrical spectacle of their own cinematographic narrative. Denis Villeneuve’s science fiction film Arrival (2016), for example, uses a non-linear structure and the narrative element of temporal dislocation.The film’s final moments reveal that its first scene, in which linguist Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) witnesses the birth and premature death of her daughter, is proven to not take place before the events of the narrative, but as a premonition of the character’s future experienced at the end of the film’s narrative proper. Villeneuve’s act of taking his viewers back to the beginning/end has the effect of completely upheaving the entire context of the narrative and characters. If we were to watch the film from the beginning again, knowing now how the film ends, our understanding of characters’ behaviours and motivations is refracted into an entirely new light. Not only is this practice incredibly rewarding for repeat viewers, but it exemplifies the extent to which the cinematic medium can enhance itself through spatiotemporal variance and a greater concentration on which images are shown, and which are withheld. 

Perhaps one of the most extremist versions of this kind of meta-cinematic manipulation is Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, a 1997 Austrian film that was remade, shot for shot, in English by the same director in 2007. The film follows a well-to-do family’s retreat to their summer home, only to be held hostage there by two neighbouring strangers. The film is one of the most glaring interrogations of violence as it is depicted in film and television, with characters frequently breaking the fourth wall to cross-examine the viewer’s complicity in the horrific scenes. Acts of violence themselves are almost never depicted outright, and instead become even more harrowing for their being only heard off-screen. This is Haneke’s own act of cinematic trick-turning, a choice that simultaneously engages and distresses the viewer. Just as the film dissolves the sanctity of the family home and the comforts associated with it, so too is the viewer continually dislocated from their conceptions of traditional narrative structure. Funny Games is depiction, endorsement and indictment, all in one. It too conducts an act of cinematic trick-turning, swiftly moving between the self-awareness that reminds its viewers that what we are watching is mere representation, and an embodiment of the very violent fare it purports to condemn. 

One of my favourite quotes from The Prestige, “are you watching closely?”, is such because of its dyadic nature: it is as much a question from illusionist to audience as it is from filmmaker to viewer, and the question that the very first shot of the film arguably to pose. The answer is, of course, not closely enough – or at least, we won’t be until the three acts have run their course, until the illusion is complete. What links these films are the questions at the heart of them: what does it mean for us to look? How often is an act of looking not necessarily one of seeing? Is what we don’t see just as important as what we do? These are the questions that help us make greater sense of films, the stories they depict, the messages they impart. And even if, as with Funny Games, we might not necessarily like what we see, it seems that we do indeed continue to look, continue to watch and continue trying to understand.