Magic is in the air with “The Prestige,” not because it’s the second movie about magicians from a major studio in nine weeks — nor because the title itself refers to the structure of an illusion — but because the trickery, or should we say wizardry, of director Christopher Nolan is more impressive here than it’s ever been before.

Even before “The Prestige,” Nolan’s fourth major film, the 36-year-old director had proven an uncanny ability to play with time and structure, turning shallow gimmicks into drama of almost Shakespearean magnitude.

His breakout, 2000’s “Memento,” played out from end to beginning (matching the main character’s lack of short-term memory), setting the audience up for an ending that rewrote everything that had come prior. In 2002’s “Insomnia,” he made time itself the enemy of a weary, sleepless, paranoid detective. His work in last year’s “Batman Begins” didn’t just resuscitate a franchise by excavating its roots, but revived the realism of the superhero film, painting Bruce Wayne not as a savior but as a conflicted and tortured soul, protecting the very city that despised him.

And so arrives “The Prestige,” a stylish film that’s far more captivating than it really deserves to be — an optical illusion that earns our admiration more than our comprehension.

Again playing with time, Mr. Nolan — along with co-writer and co-sibling Jonathan Nolan, from the book by Christopher Priest — divides the film’s timeline into three sections. In the far past, we see the earliest days of Alfred (Christian Bale) and Robert’s (Hugh Jackman) magic careers. Planted in the audience, they are the assistants of a third-rate hack, chosen by the magician to come up on-stage and help tie up assistant Julia (Piper Perabo), preparing her restraints for the infamous water tank stunt. It’s a setup that’s directly linked to what’s to come — or, as Mr. Nolan depicts it, what came before.

Sporadically, we learn about Alfred and Robert’s clashing personalities — Alfred is more arrogant and ambitious, Robert more cautious and pragmatic — and see Alfred’s determination to do things his own way.

He starts to improvise with the act, tying different kinds of knots around Julia’s hands, which worries Robert, her husband. When one night she can’t slip the knots off her hands, she drowns, and at her funeral, it becomes clear the two men will be enemies for life.

But in true Christopher Nolan style, this is not where we start the film. Much like “Batman Begins,” we begin this mystery at the midpoint, as one of the two magicians lies in a jail cell, convicted of murdering the other. And like “Memento,” we watch the past catch the present, as Alfred and Robert become embroiled in a game of cat and mouse — or unsuspecting magician and assistant — as they pursue each other in advance of this murder.

If this sounds confusing, it’s because Mr. Nolan is more skilled a director than I am a writer. He has taken a complicated story — which features a sequence in which we rapidly jump between someone reading a diary, another reading the same diary months earlier, and yet another interpreting the diary even earlier — and somehow made it both more complex, and more engrossing.

It’s a mystery wrapped around another mystery, brought to a boil over the fire of obsession, a popcorn film for the movie snob who would rather be perplexed than pandered to.

Unlike the belabored “The Illusionist,” which relied too heavily on the world of magic, illusions are merely the sideshow of what Mr. Nolan has crafted.This is really a story about obsession and one-upsmanship, about magic as a point of vulnerability when both men are most open to intimidation, embarrassment, and attack.

Three times in the film we’re informed by the sly and scruffy Michael Caine that the “prestige” is the third act of any good magic trick, following the “pledge,” in which a magician presents something ordinary, and the “turn,” in which the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary.

The flaw in the captivating, addictive “The Prestige” is that it has, well, too much prestige. If the movie were an illusion, it could have stopped at “the turn,” offering us two obsessed personalities and the most interesting on-screen rivalry in years, or even at the pledge, as these two push their obsession into the realm of the surreal and turn their quest of the perfect illusion into a more mystical, scientific endeavor.

We’re fascinated by the drama here, not by the trickery; more interested in watching these magicians duel than seeing all the levitations, transformations, and dissections they could ever possibly throw at us.

Thankfully, Mr. Nolan needs no gimmick. He doesn’t need to fool us into oohs and aahs. He’s already fooled us into seeing this engrossing bit of stagecraft as real theater.