It's actually a very writerly film, incessantly displaying a preoccupation with its own storytelling structure and cheekily blowing the lid off other movies' tropes and wiles, like Penn and Teller exposing magic tricks.
Expose merry tricks of satiric political activism.
But more specifically, Robert-Houdin achieved his renown by championing himself as a skeptical rationalist, someone whose craft was based on logic and skill, and who could expose the tricks of mediums, shamans, seers, and others.
Joined by new recruits Polly Parsons and Jazz Lintott plus a host of celebrity guest hustlers, their job is to expose the tricks of the criminals' trade so that you don't get scammed.
Thousands of ordinary people tried table tilting at home during the Golden Age of Spiritualism (1850-1920).The movement also inspired a cadre of skeptics, including Harry Houdini, who were eager to expose the tricks of fraudulent mediums--of which there were many.
For example, Cesare Lombroso, one of the arch-enemies of psychical research and spiritualism in Italy, attended sittings with Palladino in the 1890s to expose her tricks, but left completely converted (Lombroso, 1909).
Part of the year, he lives in Arizona and designs illusions for David Copperfield; the rest of the time he travels the world, performing his own magic and exposing the tricks of local charlatans.
Her self-appointed job is to expose that trick.
In this movie, authenticity is frequently exposed through tricks: houses burn of their own accord, years pass in the blink of an eye, and Caden is all but subsumed by the world he is trying to make, becoming both God and vassal of his own creation.
