The tale of two 19th-century stage illusionists, the aristocratic Rupert Angier and the working-class Alfred Borden, who engage in a bitter and epic deadly feud that ends in their respective families still feeling the effects a hundred years later. Working in the gaslight-and-velvet world of Victorian music halls, both men prowl edgily in the background of each other's shadowy life, driven to the extremes by a deadly combination of obsessive secrecy and insatiable curiosity.