The wager, the wagon, and the sixteenth birthday
Doctor Parnassus has been telling stories for a very long time — long enough to have made more than one deal with the Devil.
A show unlike any other
By day, the wagon belonging to Doctor Parnassus’s Imaginarium looks like nothing more than a battered travelling theatre, dragged through the back streets of contemporary London by a small, devoted company: the doctor himself, his teenage daughter Valentina, the barker Anton, and the diminutive stagehand Percy.
By night, its painted curtain unfolds into something else entirely — a mirror threshold. Any member of the public willing to step through finds themselves inside the Imaginarium, a landscape shaped in real time by their own desires, fears, and vanities. What they choose to do once inside decides, quite literally, which side of an ancient wager collects their soul.
An old bet comes due
Centuries ago, Parnassus won his own immortality by betting a sharp-suited, soft-spoken figure known as Mr. Nick that storytelling — the human capacity for imagination — would always outlast the temptations Mr. Nick could offer. The two have kept a running scorecard ever since, played out through the souls of ordinary people lured into the mirror.
Their latest and most personal wager concerns Valentina. She turns sixteen in days, and the terms Parnassus once accepted to save her at birth are about to come due — unless the troupe can win five souls before Mr. Nick collects his prize.
The mirror never opens the same way twice — it answers whoever is standing in front of it.
The stranger under the bridge
The balance tips when the troupe rescues a half-hanged man from beneath a bridge on the Thames. He wakes with no memory of how he got there and gives his name as Tony — a charming, quick-tongued stranger who talks his way into the show, into Valentina’s affections, and into the middle of the wager itself.
As Tony is drawn deeper into the Imaginarium, the mirror reveals him differently to different eyes: a matinee idol, a smooth-talking salesman, a haunted romantic. Each version of Tony chases the same unfinished business, and each version brings Parnassus’s company closer to discovering exactly what — and who — he really is.
We need a story that will tell itself. — Doctor Parnassus