Like the subtle differences of someone else’s cleaning efforts, our past is inescapable. A seemingly small choice can have myriad consequences, and this is what Kubrick is on about in his final flick. One day, you’re a regular shmoe, the next you’re immiserated in criminality and exploitation, the patriarchy not something you’re hearing about in a seminar hall but something rubbing up on you and drugging your drink, showing up outside your apartment, offering you a very icky quid pro quo, an aggressive gesture, a violating comment, an NDA to sign, or a straight-up cornering in a parking lot at 3am that’s going to presage a mugging, murder, or gangrape if you don’t comply.
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A rewatch of Eyes Wide Shut just over a quarter-century after its much-trumpeted release reveals that it’s still weird, and maybe even weirder now than ever. Few better places to catch a repertory screening than where I sat the weekend of Christmas 2025, at Texas Theatre, tuning fork of conspiracy, the locale where Lee Harvey Oswald was corralled by the Dallas Police, now home to arthouse cinema and live music, and with Stanley Kubrick’s canon implicated in just about every conspiracy spanning his life and works.
Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s denouement offering released shortly after his untimely death, proffers a carnal mass. It burrows into the psyche, it preaches and proselytizes, incarnating the monitory and hieratic. It’s about the underworld, in a way that recalls Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel of that name, and both that book and Kubrick’s film contain multitudes, to go back to the ur-text of Americana, “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman’s mid-nineteenth-century treatise in verse. Eyes Wide Shut reads like a treatise for the next century and a half, compacted in there to serve as a fitting finale for arguably the twentieth century’s most feted filmmaker.
It’s a large hunk of a film based on a slim novella, nearly three hours in length and languid in pace. Even more so than Arthur Schnitzler’s illusive, elusive, and allusive Dream Story (German title Traumnovelle, 1926), the film reads as a litany of the unseemly, a film about a clean white man, a doctor (like Kubrick’s father) who keeps getting dirtied. This is what tends to happen when one spelunks around the ol’ underworld, and meanwhile, the physician’s opaque, taciturn, alabaster wife finally lets loose and abreacts, allowing herself to laugh at his mishaps, his manhood, and the misprisions of maleness.
The concept of the weird, the uncanny, the unsettling, the unnerving and upsetting and disturbing thing that is itself disturbed (or the product of a disturbed genius) perforates the screen throughout the runtime. This is nineteenth-century-Dostoevsky-weird meets twentieth-century-DeLillo-weird with a dash of the Lovecraftian idea that there might just be Great Old Ones controlling everything, running the world. The orgiastic subject matter certainly makes inspired viewing in the era of Epstein Island and Diddy’s freak parties, the murder of famous film director Rob Reiner by his son and that of corrupt United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by an assassin/vigilante meme named Luigi Mangione.
In Kubrick’s London-infamously-standing-in-cartoonishly-for-NYC, Tom Cruise’s cartoonishly named (or claymation-evoking) Doctor Bill is not just hypersexualized but (like SNL’s Mister Bill) degraded, abraded, and defaced. Cruise serves as the cock-’n’-balls (or perhaps the set of boobs, as he is feminized and objectified throughout, and his theorized closeting hovered in rather unseemly portent over the film’s release and has become a decades-old conspiracy theory of its own by now) spray-painted onto fine art. True, this protagonist goes in wanting to get dirty, to sully and soil (and spoil) himself, to creep about at night and snuffle around for sex in subterranean worlds, but then, like many a bougie-boyish member of the upper classes, he doesn’t like it when he actually gets the grime he sought.
Think also of our contemporary postmodern lingua franca: “dirt” as not just pornography (dirty/filthy movies) but street crime, in the argot of The Wire and other avatars of urban noir, in a terrain the well-off white collars visit only to playact as criminals or to score drugs and kicks (think “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” by The Clash). The African American poet Tracie Morris has a fantastic 90-minute poem, an orally performed “handholding” where she reimagines Eyes Wide Shut as an alt-commentary. Morris intones, “The scariest people in the world are not black [repeated x5] / she slips on black sometimes / then she slips it off.” One of the few black (or Black, depending on your take on ID-politics in grammar and capitalization) characters in the film is the morgue employee who leads Cruise to a white body, a victim of the Übermensch class that Kubrick seems to be deconstructing, or at least holding accountable for the ghastliest of murders and disappearances. For Morris, the street criminal in the Bronx or the homeless man in Harlem are not who you should be afraid of. No, it’s the decadent folk who inhabit the literal castles in Riverside, Connecticut, The Hamptons, or Newport, Rhode Island. The stronghold in Eyes Wide Shut, out somewhere on Long Island, is called Somerton.
In real life, these highfalutin types of criminals are rarely called on the carpet, but for Cruise’s doctor character, playtime ends and ugly, adult reality infiltrates. The dirt gets in, and across the couple of days depicted in the film, it festers both within and without the doc’s household, while the sojourn undertaken over the film’s runtime is that of a man realizing that being upper-middle class doesn’t make you part of the true heavenmetal top tier, that string-pulling “1%” that runs not just America but the world, a strata-exposing tack copied ad infinitum in less fanged and less toothsome contemporary semi-satires like Saltburn, Blink Twice, or Glass Onion.
This tiniest slice of the pie graph constituting the pinnacle of “high society” has been part of the Kubrick discussion in all phases of his lauded career, from the aristocracy of Barry Lyndon to that spunky underdog named Spartacus to the villainous generals who oppose Kirk Douglas’s colonel in Paths of Glory. It’s there in the Marine Corps officers who send a character known as The Joker and his platoon mates into Vietnamese sniper fire in Full Metal Jacket. And of course the 1% and the military-industrial complex and the doctors paid to cover up the sins of the wealthiest sliver is the grist that fuels the conspiracy-loving fans of The Shining and subsequent documentary, Room 237, with its insistence that Kubrick either helped film the “faked” Apollo 11 moon landing in midsummer 1969 or was constantly trying to convey its fraudulence.
The Reddit also fulminate that Eyes Wide Shut divulges hidden truths of the enduring legacy of the Hollywood sex cult, those casting-couchers, those cigar-chompers treating women literally like sex objects, and that it was recut by Warner Bros. without Kubrick’s consent. A clip of Roger Avary on the Joe Rogan Podcast, alongside Quentin Tarantino in late 2024, virally conveyed thirdhand accounts of an irate Kubrick screaming at executives and producers who he felt had hijacked the master’s final-cut privileges. And then four days later Kubrick was dead! Before Stan could properly finish it, the haves, those string-pullers and world-runners, the cabal of elites, perhaps actually conspired to whack that dear old exacting chess aficionado, the expatriate Mister Kubrick, ending his life but cementing even further his legacy, and leading an army of drug-smoking and light-night-hypothesizing keyboard warriors and armchair detectives to decode his swan song forever.
As intriguing as the revelations of the Pulp Fiction creators are, Eyes Wide Shut is, for me, more of a late period no-fucks-given film, an established auteur (who as an up-and-comer shot photos for Look magazine) acceding to his tawdrier impulses, a girthy old codger not realizing that his time was short on the earth. This is essentially a tongue-in-cheek caricature of monogamy, the “Love you long time” sample from his previous film extended to feature length via the longest shoot in film history and featuring Hollyweird’s “it-couple” of the fin de siècle in Cruise and Kidman. A favored take on this era comes from actress-turned-filmmaker Sarah Polley, responding to their magazine cover on Premiere as evidence of systemic sexism: “Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise were both on the covers of big magazines at the same time to promote the movie, only she was posed half naked with this incredibly sultry look at the camera while Tom Cruise had a head shot of him looking powerfully into the camera.” Miss Polley, now a director and showrunner, has seen behind the scrim from an early age, a former child actor and famously one of the individuals Harvey Weinstein tried to exploit.
We must also remember that in 1999 we were way before the smartphone, a world predating Facebook or Twitter, when online dating was AOL chatrooms and Match.com 1.0. This film transpires before 9/11, before President Obama and President Trump, and before the mainstreaming of polyamory or internet porn.
To tweak my “So Weird!” thesis a smidgen, think of it this way: If you remove the A-list cast and the Kubrickian suggestion of integrity and critical acceptability, this film is just a sticky-floored cinema seat over from 1998’s Wild Things and Very Bad Things, the former featuring the then Mrs. Sheen and Neve Campbell from Scream and the latter that dead-hooker movie with Christian Slater and all the ’90s-est thespians one could cull together in a grindhouse schlockfest (and Peter Berg’s directorial debut). Both of those “racy” entertainments were released less than a year earlier, and Eyes Wide Shut itself is not full-on schlock only because it’s given a proper double-lacquering of Kubrick’s trademark obsessive highbrow varnish.
Cruise’s Dr. Bill Harford – because “Harvard” would’ve been too obvious? Or could Mr. Kubrick sense that one of his cinematic inheritors, Mr. Fincher, would get to that particular haves-hive a decade down the road with The Social Network? – is drawn to the seedy, but he’s very much unwild at heart, to bring in another important referent. There are no Lynchian excesses here, no closeups of women scrawling their faces with makeup, no decapitations or heinous teeth, no warts or sores or fully assaultive scenes featuring bruised-and-beaten nudity or deformity. Unsettling piano, yes. Implication, yes. Maybe even “the most perverse Christmas movie ever made” or some suitably clickbait-seeking title. But while Eyes Wide Shut may be about ritualized debauchery (particularly the year-end saturnalia), it is not itself debauched. There is no lurid violence on the screen. Even the now unexpurgated orgy scene remains glittery and tasteful. Fully bizarre, batshit, deranged, and sucked into the mud? No. But weird? Yes. Downright dystopically contrived, aware of its own contrivance, and abidingly weird.
It’s been labeled both an amateurish failure and a gorgeous masterpiece. Over the intervening years, it’s been more gossiped about, Rorschached, and litmus tested than objectively evaluated. Biased expectations are apparent in the 1999 criticism that arbitrated its “impotence and lack of heat” (Rob Dreher in the New York Post, who also called it a softcore banality equivalent to Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace) or called it a “monogamy lecture” (Charles Taylor in Salon who saw it as conventional and hoopla-driven, an arthouse Army-training film). David Edelstein at Slate hated it (“a somnolent load of wank”), J. Hoberman in The Village Voice picked up on its unfinished vibes (“a rough draft at best”), Scorsese loved it and voted it his fave of the year in a guest spot on Siskel & Ebert, and David Thomson used it as a launching pad to argue that all films are psychoanalytical, concluding with an all-but-clairvoyant question: “Are we nearing the last moments of human history in which anyone could, with confidence, distinguish life from fantasy?”
Others think it’s aged fairly well, like Lee Siegel, who convincingly argues in Harper’s that its haters on initial release were responding more to the sharp juxtaposition between the film’s publicity campaign and the film itself than to the actual work. Others think it’s aged rather poorly, that it was, like Coppola’s recent Megalopolis, a true decades-in-the-making passion project, antiquated by a conception that dated back to the early 1960s, when “early in his career, Kubrick compiled ideas and started developing several inward-looking scripts about marriage, sex, and infidelity to confront his fixations, including screenplays called Jealousy, The Married Man, and A Perfect Marriage.” That’s Brian Eggert of Deep Focus Review, who also calls Eyes Wide Shut meandering, unorthodox, and impenetrable, and notes that Kubrick at one point in the early ’70s thought of adapting Dream Story into a black-and-white film starring Woody Allen, while Brian Raftery in Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen states that Kubrick also met with Steve Martin a little after that.
An author who does an excellent job contending that it’s half-finished is Greg Gerke, who states that “when Kubrick died on March 7, 1999, there was still a little over four months until Eyes Wide Shut’s release date, July 16. There is no basis to argue Kubrick wouldn’t have altered the film right up to that date and possibly even beyond as he did with 2001 and The Shining, films most similar to Eyes Wide Shut. Michael Herr says, “there was looping to be done and the music wasn’t finished, lots of small technical fixes on color and sound, but it wasn’t ready to show.’” Todd Field agrees: “What we have is Stanley’s first cut. . . . If post-production on past films is taken into even modest consideration, it’s clear Eyes Wide Shut would have been a different film” (Raftery).
For my taste, Stanley keeps it a tad too smooth and arch, sleeker and more gussied up than it needs. He wasn’t trying to get people titillated or launch bromides from a lectern, but his relationship to Cruise looks more calculated, or at least more scrutinizable as that of a marionettist – there’s a Stockholm Syndrome patois in Cruise’s reminiscences about his days locked in the bank vault as the genius’s hostage when listening to the former Thomas Mapother from Jersey narrate the well-made but hagiographic documentary from SK’s brother-in-law and collaborator Jan Harlan, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. I might even say it sounds like a bottom talking about his loving top (or a convert who was happy to be the film world Koresh’s handpicked wife for a spell).
Cruise’s reputation as the world’s most famous (and successful) Scientologist is also hard to avoid, but in his favor, the only difference between a cult and a religion is time, and this former middle-class NYC-banlieue boy became the empire’s most famous prince (per Raftery, “By 1999, there was only one long-running movie property bigger than Star Wars: Tom Cruise”), one Kubrick reportedly pilloried with questions about his real-life marriage to co-star Nicole Kidman as prep to the wet-street wanderings of the lost hubby haunted by images of his wife fornicating with a dress-uniform stud (which the novella gets out of the way early on, less than ten pages into Chapter 1, while the film treats it more like a centerpiece of great consequence). Repeated cutbacks to Cruise self-seriously flashing over and over to visions of his wife in (gasp!) the arms of another man are my least favorite scenes in the film and affirm critiques that the picture meanders through an overdetermined and labyrinthine plot. Stainless costumes and gunge-less orgies are also questionable-at-best aspects of this slick concoction’s mise-en-scène.
Stanley here at the end loops around back to his days as a photog for the glossies; he clearly wants it slick and silent, a pagan mass peopled with masked-faced, breast-implanted strippers, with mask-faced (and what elaborate masks they are; they hold up well) male extras, and with the queen stripper voiced over by perhaps our greatest living actor – Cate Blanchett in a kitsch-note cantata to pair with Todd Field’s jazzman schtick-ing it up at the Sonata Café; perhaps SK can even be credited for influencing the hell out of Cate and Todd’s immersive but didactic 2022 release Tár. Kubrick, like Dr. Bill, wanted controlled dirt. But the truly dirty and smutty is not containable by passwords and illuminati orgies. Dirt is unruly, uncontainable, it stains and spreads, it gets out of the lab and goes viral whether you want it to or not.
Some of the best dirt is the glint in Cruise’s eye as we are forced to look at Todd Field’s Nick Nightengale, his facial hair (cinema’s “dirtiest” goatee?) and head shape made to look garishly like the Devil’s. Tár probably owes too many debts to SK, but Field’s incarnation of capital-S sleaze here is an all-timer, and his jazz-club meetup with Cruise is where Kubrick inserts himself Hitchockianly into the background as a fellow patron a few tables over. The director transposes the Nightengale character into a chthonian realm, forcing Dr. Bill to literally descend into the city, a man entering hell.
Hell’s door is manned by a stout and tuxedoed doorman – black servant #1, as the mortuary’s aforementioned gatekeeper is #2; he will open the door of the slab on which the body of Mandy, the woman who vowed to “save” or “redeem” Bill at the orgy, lies. And there is one other notable person of color – not Marion – played by Marie Richardson, a woman with a crush on Dr. Bill whose husband who he’d been treating has just died, a minor character and sort of a twin to Bill’s wife Alice but one who’s still trying to realize her fantasy, whereas Kidman’s Mrs. Harford confesses that she didn’t follow hers – but Marion’s housekeeper, named Rosa. The servants, notably, don’t get dialogue (no SAG card for them), but the doorman opens the jazz club’s door and down Harford goes into the bloody-red heart of capitalism and consumerism where the imp-like and younger-looking-than-his-years Nick sits warped, hunched over, demoniacally contorted and Gould-like on his piano bench, the burdened lower-class artist, a demiurge plying a dying artform while his wife and four kids are back in Seattle, a full continent away because the med-school dropout, the uninitiated, the low-class peon (and psychopomp, a Charon figure) has to go where the work is. Whereas Bill – who in the novella anyway is someone who turned down the academic side of medicine because it didn’t pay enough, whose white linen doctor’s coat is also a “costume” – gets to set his own hours and do house calls for an engaged woman like Marion, who tries to initiate sex with him over the dead body of her father.
If Kubrick is synonymous with a single word, it’s “control.” And you don’t get to control what kind of dirt you get on you. In “The Horror of Love – On Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle [Dream Story],” originally published in 1985 but not translated into English until 2025, W. G. Sebald saw in the source novel a froideur-laden exposure of how “bourgeois society is, according to its own precepts, incompatible with promiscuity” (promiscuity = playing in the dirt) and also an exposure of necrophilic dirt – “a voyeuristic desire that knows it can only be indulged without inhibition in the contemplation of a lifeless object.” For the theists out there, consider the notions of “saving” or “redemption” offered by Mandy (a diminutive of Amanda meaning “lovable,” “worthy of love,” or “she who must be loved’) and how she becomes the signifying corpse by story’s end.
Kubrick’s atheism has always seemed a bit mealymouthed and circumlocutious for a Jewish man from Brooklyn who was raised secular – one who liked to cheekily claim that “he was not really a Jew, he just happened to have two Jewish parents” (Raphael) and gave varied Dylan-esque responses about his oeuvre as a whole, 2001 especially, from the snooze-inducing “I will say that the God concept is at the heart of Two-Thousand One but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately one hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately one hundred billion galaxies in just the visible universe” to the contrarian “Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema” to famously calling Stephen King in the middle of the night to ask if King believed in God and then when King said “Yes,” Kubrick replied in the negative or hung up on the author, depending on which version you believe. But either way, call it dirt or call it sin, this grappling with God reads as part of the propositional bedrock of Eyes Wide Shut.
There’s a pervasive Catholic tone too, as if a self-exiling, self-punishing Kubrick could never forgive himself for once upon a time selling out to make compromised popcorn flicks for the studios or as an up-and-comer allowing someone else to draw up the posters, which he famously took over on A Clockwork Orange in 1971 and never relinquished. Most of us humans don’t like dirt in our homes (and what’s more bourgeois than the notion of a “home”?), either literally or figuratively, and no one, even a professional, can really clean your domicile the way you can yourself, right? The auteur’s creative temperament is like nothing so much as coming in after the maid you just paid and then shaking your head as you run a finger along a curtain rod or grimace at the faint whorls reflecting off the freshly cleaned tub: You would have started with the curtain rods! You would never have scrubbed the porcelain in such a slipshod manner!
Like the subtle differences of someone else’s cleaning efforts, our past is inescapable. A seemingly small choice can have myriad consequences, and this is what Kubrick is on about in his final flick. One day, you’re a regular shmoe, the next you’re immiserated in criminality and exploitation, the patriarchy not something you’re hearing about in a seminar hall but something rubbing up on you and drugging your drink, showing up outside your apartment, offering you a very icky quid pro quo, an aggressive gesture, a violating comment, an NDA to sign, or a straight-up cornering in a parking lot at 3am that’s going to presage a mugging, murder, or gangrape if you don’t comply. The orgy ringmaster’s (Leon Vitali, his character listed as Red Cloak) threat to an unmasked Dr. Bill? “I warn you; if you make any further inquiries, or if you say a single word to anyone about what you have seen, there will be the most dire consequences for you and your family.” The veneer drops away quick. That sheer unabated weirdness, and its strange and ceaseless ribboning out of oddity and deeply imbrued dirt; these are Eyes Wide Shut’s most inimitable contributions.
It keeps its t-shirt on when it goes swimming, it doesn’t do the full raving-mad ultraviolent bloodbath that Lynch comes at you with in Wild at Heart, but like that film and like few other widely released American films of the 1990s, Kubrick’s closing number consistently peals the tocsin of the deeply weird and peels back the layers of composure we pile upon our more reptilian selves. In Eyes Wide Shut, objectification and dehumanization reign. Women turn up dead or disappear, and men don’t fare much better. Nick Nightengale, even if he’s not destined for servitude as a low-level demon, he’s at the very least beaten and possibly killed or “disappeared.” Predation and corruption are constantly afoot in a variety of guises low-, high-, and middlebrow. They’re even there in the metastory about the censoring and rearranging of the film, the digital manipulation of images, the grafting of Blanchett’s voice onto another woman’s body.
Speaking of masks, the kid in the eye-of-providence A Clockwork Orange t-shirt who’s seen Room 237 a dozen times, seated in the back row or the bar at the revival house, might nudge you: Did you know that Kubrick “predicted” Covid? And that his movies are all secretly about the slaughter of the Native Americans? And that The Shining is about how the moon landing was staged? And that Eyes Wide Shut is actually a film about pedophiles? And that he chose Tom and Nicole because he’d heard they were both gay and thus beards for each other? And down the “Kubrick was a high-ranking Freemason!” rabbit hole this film experience can take you.
I’ll give Greg Gerke a second quote here, a lunge-punch line from his piece “Unappeasable and Peregrine: Eyes Wide Shut at 20” published in The Smart Set: “There is little ‘denying’ in Kubrick – you enter a world of shit and what you shit smells like shit.” OK, Criterion hasn’t yet gotten to their “Flachspüler: filmmakers whose style = German toilet” series, but there’s something ripe going on here, with this I agree, from Dr. Bill’s voyeurism to wifey Alice’s boredom-turned-fuck-this-exhibitionism. Gerke’s presentation of Eyes Wide Shut compels when it goes on to say:
Eyes Wide Shut is a mystical film, a babble of words that makes a very brazen echo chamber. Dozens and dozens of times characters repeat dialogue, so much so that one thinks those “Eyes” or “I’s” of the title are so solipsistic and selfish they really can’t hear anything, except their own drone. Dr. Bill is the greatest offender, though Alice parrots when she is drunk and twirling with the suave Hungarian, when high on pot, and at the end in the toy store. The delight in language is on full display in Kubrick’s most cutting film on communication.
The inefficacy of language, yes, but I find it more scientific and clinical than mystical. Kubrick’s characters are almost always desexed (maybe that’s why Spielberg reveres him so). I don’t deny that his worlds are shitted up (Full Metal Jacket concludes with The Joker declaiming in voice-over while singing the “Mickey Mouse March” with his platoon mates: “I am in a world of shit, yes, but I am alive, and I am not afraid”), but I also think they’re lithoid, trussed. Even Nabokov’s Lolita is sapped of sexuality in Kubrick’s imagination. Tarantino was onto something when he said, “I think Adrian Lyne’s Lolita is a masterpiece. . . . When I saw it, I thought, ‘Boy, I don’t know if Kubrick even read the novel.’ Kubrick manages to take that book and make this madcap comedy out of it that’s actually pretty terrific. But the idea that you can do a movie about Lolita and not have one single, solitary disturbing image in it at all is crazy. It’s fraudulent! I mean, to me he’s missing the most fascinating part of the work, which is looking through a pedophile’s eyes and actually going along with it” (MacFarquhar).
Kubrick is not as curiously matched with the source text in Eyes Wide Shut, although with Schnitzler’s minimalist pastiche of European first-wave surrealism applied to the domestic realm, its thoroughgoing Austrian-ness is the hardest thing to translate – Nabokov lived in America and was post-cinema, but Schnitzler never lived in the US and preceded the rise of movies. In terms of this component, along with the recurrent critiques of Kubrick’s decision that for Eyes Wide Shut he would have London stand in for New York (to allow him to “control” the sets), the subject matter in some ways may have been better suited for David Lynch (or Canada’s David Cronenberg, or Schnitzler’s fellow Austrian Michael Haneke). And frankly, I wouldn’t mind seeing a woman – Kubrick himself was supposedly turned on to Schnitzler’s work by his second wife, Ruth Sobotka, a Viennese expat and danseuse – take a shot at not a remake but perhaps something inspired by inverting the Schnitzler source novella. Schnitzler is having a bit of a resurgence with the death of Tom Stoppard drawing attention to the acclaimed British adaptations of Schnitzler’s Das Weite Land (as Undiscovered Country) and Liebelei (as Dalliance). There’s also an adaptation of Schnitlzer’s Late Fame in the works to be directed by Kent Jones and starring Willem Defoe and Greta Lee, and there’s the German film Traumnovelle, released in 2025 and helmed by Florian Frerichs, which offers a contemporary-Berlin-set take on the Schnitzler book – a novella decidedly more focused on the husband (Fridolin) than on the wife (Albertina). But what I mean is more an “Albertina’s version,” where we get to see what she Albertina/Alice was doing while Fridolin/Bill was out on his illicit odyssey; it could be directed by Julia Ducournau or Halina Reijn, Coralie Fargeat or Alice Rohrwacher.
Topical and explosive “adult material” (the conjecture about the film in 1999) is at odds with Kubrick’s cold and antiseptic style, and his refusal of naturalism makes Eyes Wide Shut appear anything but erotic, in fact awkward and stagy. It may puncture some facade of the American upper crust, or skewer the hypocrisies of polite society, but the film does those (multiple) notably weak Cruise-walking-around scenes, Dr. Bill punching his fist into his palm, emoting through clenched teeth in a pre-Uber car-service sedan or a yellow cab, stopping at a newsstand to make sure he’s not being followed. These are the closest to shrug-evoking as Stanley has in his mature oeuvre. And the tone of some of the leerers Cruise picks up along the way is exaggeratedly cartoonish, maybe part of the point but sometimes to the film’s detriment. Alan Cumming’s effeminately smitten gay-lisp desk clerk might read as humorous in an over-the-top-on-purpose way (as if to say: See, straight men, this is how you look when you fawn over and objectify sexually desirable women) and the actor himself has expressed “I felt so comfortable with him [Kubrick] . . . I really let loose with this character and he just encouraged me to go, and to try out new stuff,” but the scene jars when viewed today.
The opening set piece is rather protracted as well, and while the knee jerk may be to blame our waning attention spans, the paired flirtations of Alice (with a rando Hungarian baron) and Bill (with two lithe debutante-ish models), they drag. And whether it’s more on Kubrick or cinematographer Larry Smith, the spin move that accompanies Kidman and Sky du Mont (as the thirsty Eurotrash playboy silverfox character Sandor Szavost) in their tête-à-tête grows tiresome. The call-girl energy of the ménage-bating lasses rings rather false for the shindig in question and detracts from the shock that Kubrick tries to deliver when Bill is called upstairs by Victor (Sydney Pollack in one of his late actor turn roles of real accomplishment, alongside the one in Michael Clayton) to revive a whore who’s taken a speedball of heroin and coke. Even the extended Cruise-vs-Kidman infidelity arguments (and the password to the orgy being “fidelio,” as opposed to “Denmark” in the book, a bit on the nose) show the strain of repeated takes, and I don’t know how well the debate itself actually tracks: The audience is expected to believe that a doctor and his wife are a decade into their marriage and they’ve really never discussed before whether his patients might find him attractive or whether he’s ever aroused by an attractive female patient seen in the buff? Yes, Nicole’s “If you men only knew how wanton we are” monologue hums with feminist brio, but it’s one of the things that seems like less of a consequential revelation or epiphany to hang the whole story on when encountered through repeated viewings. It also reads more than ever as influenced by the Clinton presidency, with Bill outed as the Harvey Weinstein of politics.
The set design, art direction, and costume design are fantastic, though. The sprawling Sydney Pollack diatribes recall Jackson Pollock canvases. Some of the Tom-vs-Nicole stuff reminds of one-act plays. The Picassoan mask orgy is splendid. And the basement with the costumes and the sinewy underage Gollum that is Leelee Sobieski, these still all kick much ass in the middle of the 2020s. Even if you don’t subscribe to the readings which are certain that the film ends with Bill and Alice selling their child Helena (or abducted, like Helen of Troy, they argue) to sex traffickers, the weirdness and the perversion are there in Milich’s basement with his jailbait daughter.
The Leelee Sobieski scene viewed today reads as unerringly fascinated by pedophilia, or at least cusping sexuality, nymphettes, or the age of some of the women who were piloted to Epstein Island. There in the costume shop’s netherworld, the source text’s European milieu is injected into an immigrant kinkifying his own daughter (who perhaps likes it herself) for the paid pleasures of pansexual purveyors. Aggressively Asian males and all their own burdened stereotypes (small-penis, imperialist masculinities) are there in the basement as well, this place where a significant costume is bought, where a commodity is exchanged for money. In this scene most of all, a profluent ickiness abides.
The now-retired Sobieski in a whispering-only (her voice, though she was fourteen at the time, was known for being deep and gravelly, New Yorky and DeLillo-esque) performance set in perdition is the thing that blows the haircut’s hair back and really makes him, Dr. Bill, via Cruise at his most patriarchal, and us as audience, take pause, and think about how the strip clubs, porn sites, OnlyFans apps, hotel swim-up resort bars at locales nowadays derided by White Lotus as well as the lower-middle-class chain restaurants featuring firm-keestered lasses in Daisy Dukes or low-cut blouses or saucily knotted cleavage blouses to up their tips are all part of the same conspiracy (or evolutionary biology) with the cheerleaders on the sidelines of the NFL games and the Vegas cocktail waitresses or scantily clad blackjack dealers: they trade in the flesh of pretty young things, and their customers in the poolside cabanas and luxury boxes and VIP sections may be barons or good ol’ boys or drudges who pooled their paychecks, but all races and classes of men from all over the world become the purchasers, the consumers, simultaneously the exploiters and exploited, trapped in their own testosteroned depravities be they potential or kinetic. This particularly reverenced and ever-perceptive Übermensch film director, the loving father and demanding patriarch, the some-say-he-went-too-far bullying of Shelley Duvall or the titanic genius and scion that exceeds them all – one starts to think about how scary and unsafe Eyes Wide Shut still feels in the 2020s and is tempted to drop to a knee and subject themselves like the protagonist in the film.
Keep in mind that this is a director who responded to Matthew Modine celebrating after a take by saying “That one felt real” with “Real is good, but interesting is better” (“Sydney Pollack”). And while Gerke argues that “Eyes Wide Shut is about humanness, probably more than any other Kubrick film,” I see it more as returning to his symbolic universe of objectification and dehumanization, cinema as Freudian voyeurism and exhibitionism. The Gerke take I unreservedly second is that the film “takes one of the oldest saws of dysfunctional relationships – doing onto a lover what they have done to you – and submerges it in a reflective anodyne, a chemical bath that stains the players for even beginning to think in such vengeful notions. The irony is both the players engage in imagined infidelities without consummation, though the prostitute Domino’s kiss of Dr. Bill, his flirting with the models, and his feeling up of Sally are real as is Alice’s flirting with the Hungarian.” It’s a chilly and non-erotic film on purpose. The priest of dehumanization for his final trick leads the leading man and woman of their day onto the path, past the rushes and weeds, into the boat, perks up their characters’ subconsciousness with marijuana (or just intentionally tries to fray his leads’ nerves with an excruciatingly long shoot), and takes them down, down, down into Stygian lands, the diabolical seemingly foresworn but actually just forestalled. A price to be paid by story’s end? Perhaps. The novella ends with a “victorious ray of light” and their child’s laughter signaling a new day, but the film ends at a toy store and a fucking (of one sort or another).
I saw it in the theater the Friday of its release and it has felt like a mindfuck on every successive viewing. A “perfect” wasteless film it is not. In 1999, expectations had been ratcheted up because Kubrick releases were so exceedingly rare. As we enter the latter 2020s, post-film discussions of “Which cuts would you use to trim this thing down and make it a better movie” erupt fluidly, and the themes fit Stanley’s corpus, but let’s move to Kidman’s mantis-like Alice (in wonderland), the vortex of the film’s domestic turbulence. And let’s home in at the end, where Alice’s exhausted, perhaps even extirpated, utterance of the film’s concluding word, “fuck,” is a condemnatory thing – the wife (and, more importantly, womanhood as a whole) has been sucked into the whirlpool of faceless and porny hedonism. Kidman’s gangly-bordering-on-insectile Alice becomes, by film’s end, someone voluntarily divesting themselves of their humanness (and if you side with the conspiracy kids, selling her child to sex slavers in order to preserve her cushy upper-class lifestyle), a wife willing to turn a blind eye, like Carmela Soprano, who debuted on HBO in 1999 as well. But it sure seems like Alice has given up, acquiesced, relinquished her face to become meat/body; she is the slave who of their own volition actively opts for and chooses their own slavery. She’s got a mind but knows she lives in a society (or an American corpocratic patriarchy) where attractive women are encouraged to be a doctor’s wife or a Barbie doll (which hadn’t yet been turned into “Academic Theory for Dummies” by Greta Gerwig) like the one her daughter lifts up in the toy store near film’s end. Alice, by saying they need to fuck, has adopted the enslaver’s dehumanizing worldview (or she wants to start on a new child to replace the one they just handed over as payment for Bill breaking the cult’s rules) – is she second-wave feminism’s last ultimate (white) victim? Or is it: What do you get for fantasizing about an affair with a roguish military man instead of your beloved herr doctor? You have to sacrifice your child and then get your Job (from “The Book of Job”)-like man brewing up that next one. There’s something sinister and transactional afoot in that toy store, whatever your “take” on whether they’re being tracked by a couple of weirdos of ill-intended ilk, whether you think there’s a voluntary relinquishing of their daughter Helena, or an abduction, or neither, as some even have postulated a happy, sex-positive ending to the film, perhaps a sibling, a boy to pair with their girl.
Can a married couple that has shrugged and accepted the chaos of life be downright biblical in its possibilities? Or maybe social customs like marriage are invented tropes, atrophying old technologies. We’re all billiard balls on a bloody red table, birthed into this world as helpless animals, and the strings of the world are pulled by men who age into a pile of paunch, whether that paunch resembles the Hutt-like Harvey Weinstein or the slightly more debonair version seen here, the well-fed, thick-middled, tuxedo’d character played by Sydney Pollack – whose character might as well be called The Mansplainer but whose name, Victor Ziegler, very much channels the idea of old-school Hollywood producer/predator whose nomenclature evokes aristocracy and Germanic fascism. As much as American capitalism makes it overt, exploitation en masse is a global phenomenon. And if there’s a creepiness apex (or nadir) in Eyes Wide Shut, it’s the daughter-pimping of Mr. Milich, played by the excellent Croatian actor Rade Šerbedžija, revealed when Dr. Bill returns his costume in the morning. The character played by Sobieski is identified only as “Milich’s daughter” (similar to how many Biblical women remain unnamed and are only identified as “daughter of” or “wife of”) and is played with marvelous cunning by a well-before-her-18th actor. Her literal whisper into Cruise’s ear after her own titterings and group-sex weirdness the prior evening with a couple of Asian men (in whiteface makeup) were interrupted by Milich, who appeared about to call the police on the adult scoundrels and have them taken in as fornicators and defilers of his child, and she ran to the doctor to recommend an accessory for his costume (a cloak lined in ermine, the lip-readers tell us, as the conspire-kids argue that it’s a metonym for jailbait vagina), but “We have come to another arrangement,” he informs Dr. Bill the following morning when Bill returns the costume (having lost the, or our, “mask”).
Humanity as a whole needeth a good scouring, Stanley elucidates, to be unmasked and exposed and humiliated. We’re only better than selling our own children if we continue to fight, to civilize, to progress, to use our restraint, the thing that separates us from animals, to not give in to our more savage thirsts and hungers. To evolve (see 2001). Gerke points out that Eyes Wide Shut is the only Kubrick film without an on-screen murder, but Kubrick’s disdain for consumerist dehumanizations feels authentic, and maybe he did want to editorialize that the truly privileged commit crimes that go fully unseen. It reminds me of something I read about the rats of New York City – if you even so much as see a rat in NYC, it’s a weak rat; the strong ones you never even get eyes on.
Despite Kubrick fandom’s aversion to how his name has become a brand, it’s hard to argue against his canonical status, and one of the truly great museum installations I’ve ever seen was when LACMA ran an exhibition on his career in 2012-2013, and the allure of sex versus the allure of “having” someone, a companion, this is what the non-Pollack parts of the film are about. Pollack’s presence seems more sigil of The Secret World, the rich and powerful men who manipulate reality, the Pynchonian thing, or Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War.” Watching the film in the bling-and-sadness-soaked mid-2020s, after the rise of prestige TV, the continued elevation of hip-hop and pop, the abject proliferation of the internet, the smartphone, and the app-ification of everything, it’s readily apparent that solipsism and selfishness are what the film is about, and in that sense it (and Kubrick’s whole body of work) is prescient.
The world of Dr. Bill is a predictable pre-internet one where if you’re white and handsome and you study hard, despite a lack of height, if you’ve got those good looks and that shark smile, you can become a doctor (or international movie star). Yeah, by your adulthood your doctorly existence is a bit circumscribed and hooker-less, you’re a bit of a schmuck and your old buddy Nightclub Nick is the most interesting male in the movie, and the beer-swilling football bros could kick your ass, so you’re not an “alpha” and all that, but you’re still a striking doctor, the ultimate catch, and played by Tom Cruise you’re a schmuck but not a shlub.
Paul Giamatti plays shlub (hateable in Private Parts or lovable in The Holdovers or somewhere in between in Sideways). Philip Seymour Hoffman in almost all his early roles, most memorably Scotty in Boogie Nights, that’s a shlub. If we’re alluding to another Kubrick descendent, Paul Thomas Anderson, Cruise’s Bill is more like the young Dirk Diggler before the fall – a whole city wants to sleep with him, and it’s the old-world cities, not sunny LA but dusky, wintry, and light-lacking New York (via sooty London). PTA in There Will Be Blood hits full-on Kubrick acolyte level, and he makes films about objectification and families, too, but he’d spend far more time with Bill and Alice’s spawn than Stanley does. Whatever the fate of young Helena in Eyes Wide Shut, she’s a plot device and not a character. She emblemizes the product of the bourgeois life her parents risk toppling should their exploration of repressed sexual desires and subconscious urges go unchecked.
The story elements in Eyes Wide Shut – the withholding and the meandering as well – remain arty, but the casting was cineplex. The film came out in a year stuffed with game-changing movies, and if not for his death may have pinged a much different chord. The critical dismissals were almost entirely a result of old-media hype (concocted gossip, aka: the dirt) combined with viewers being bored with its length and pacing. To look at it in that context, it hadn’t much of a “hook” (not within the film itself, anyway, not “internally”) by 1999 standards. Even in its “external” postmodern incarnation, with distance, looking back, yeah, it had prestige, but it wasn’t doing something that rang originality bells (the two aforementioned movies with “Wild” in the title came out in the previous twelve months and are much more abject and gratuitous about their ambitions). It wasn’t a no-budget B&W horror movie with non-actors and a visionary internet campaign that could only exist during internet 1.0 like The Blair Witch Project or the birth of the Charlie Kaufman style with Being John Malkovich. It didn’t have a kid fucking a pie or a kid who could see dead people as in American Pie and The Sixth Sense. It couldn’t offer the effects Rubicon that was The Matrix or the twitchy eighty-minute runtime of Run Lola Run. It didn’t have the snarky badinage and gender-in-politics ridiculing of Alexander Payne finding his dramedic voice in Election or the twisty Nine-Inch-Nails-y nihilism of Fincher’s Fight Club.
The “rough cut” aspect of the film, especially in the second half, is unmissable now. The first half of Eyes Wide Shut reads as far more “finished,” tighter and leaner, while the back end is shambolic and ragged. The normie lead gets dragged into the muck in this film, so much so as to make it a satire – of everything from economic class to the online theories that posit that the lead couple in both the film and in real life are pedophilic child abusers – but the swampy mire is there at a plot level too. After the orgy, there’s a lot of explainer-ade, Pollack’s character going on about “you wouldn’t believe who was under those masks, brutha,” a subplot about a hooker with AIDS (updating perhaps Schnitzler’s latent fears about syphilis; the author of Dream Story had seen a friend die six months after a night with a prostitute), the was-it-all-a-dream-y “how did she get the mask and why would she keep it” question going unanswered, and other alternations between “big plot twist” and lingering camera and tinkling piano that burbles pretty close to the boil of kitsch. After Bill is unmasked at the ceremony, you’re left with more parts than sum.
Freshness seeker until the end, though? Longer stretches between each film because visionary future-knowing Kubrick sussed that things were getting attenuated, that the internet was about to rise up and kill cinema? Can’t dismiss it. So when I say weird, I guess I need to close by clarifying what I don’t mean. From the vantage of our internetted and social media’d present, looking at this film, watching it for my tenth time now, it’s very retro. It’s the opposite of a sneaker release from Nike, the comments section beneath the new Marvel trailer leak, or a Netflix twelve-episode dump. It’s an elegant piece of artfulness about dirt and sin. I don’t hear in the piano keys or see in stoic-faced old white (or White) gatekeepers the word “haunting.” I’m not shaken or moved emotionally, nor do I think there’s a hidden “message” about how the illuminati-alien-lizard people run the whole shebang. It’s cerebral. It’s just plain weird. And I don’t mean “weird” like merely eerie or ominous. I mean odd and aloof, tucked away and shy, too private, maybe even ashamed – a film from a man who was about anything but oversharing. It’s not holding anyone’s hand or releasing a director’s commentary. It’s not nearly that hoary. It’s just not PornHub. And it’s not even whichever ageless version of cyborgian-ness the medical-industrial complex has cobbled together for the entities known as Kidman and Cruise, the ones of Big Little Lies or Nine Perfect Strangers. Of Top Gun: Maverick or Mission: Impossible (whichever number or part; the first motion picture in that series came out three full years before Eyes Wide Shut!).
Kubrick was unafraid to pass judgment. He was a critical thinker. Curmudgeonly and routine-based maker, family man, unmanscaped old heteronorm, and in his work he was a seeker, pushing and pushing; new genres, novel expressions, not cadging or lifting anyone else’s style but eternally following his own muse. In Eyes Wide Shut he’s the chessmaster reaching the endgame, saddened that a mate means the game is over, but he was still trying to conjure up new openings, mid-game tricksterisms, and checkmate closings right until the end. “Where else could he have gone?” comes up a lot in the reviews regardless of when they were published.
That we can never know. Same as we won’t know whether this is a film that ends with parents abandoning a child or just foregoing their former uptight selves, as a filmmaker abandoned his art and his life rather too soon and crossed into a fairer plane (or nothing). This ever-zeitgeisty and never-expiring phantom, slippery and evocative prophet ’til the end, ghost-story dreamer weaving one last wild-and-weird one for idolatrous fans and tepid critics alike? Maybe, but more than 2001 or A Clockwork Orange or The Shining, I think this one will remain an ember more than a full conflagration. The human who made it was many things, but he wasn’t a diminishing star and he wasn’t past his prime. His final film may not have shocked people the way they wanted to be shocked in 1999, but its echoes still resonate, and people continue to return, to watch and discuss, with their eyes just regular, neither wide nor shut.
Works Cited
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Dreher, Rod. “Eyes Glaze Over.” New York Post. 16 Jul 1999. https://nypost.com/1999/07/16/eyes-glaze-over-softcore-finale-gets-just-12/. Accessed 28 Dec 2025
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Eyes Wide Shut: Special Edition (Blu-ray). Directed by Stanley Kubrick, performances by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Warner Home Video, 2008.
Gerke, Greg. “Unappeasable and Peregrine: Eyes Wide Shut at 20.” The Smart Set. 8 Aug 2019. https://www.thesmartset.com/unappeasable-and-peregrine/
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Schnitzler, Arthur. Dream Story. Translated by Otto P. Schinnerer, Sun & Moon Classics, 1990, Los Angeles.
Sebald, W.G. “The Horror of Love – On Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle [Dream Story].” Silent Catastrophes. Translated by Jo Catling, Random House, 2025.
“Sydney Pollack on Stanley Kubrick: Sydney Pollack talks about his experience working with Stanley Kubrick on “Eyes Wide Shut,” October 22nd, 2005.” YouTube, uploaded by KGSM MediaCache, 24 Apr 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCuhJNwHitA
Taylor, Charles. “Eyes Wide Shut” Salon. 16 Jul 1999. Access 28 Dec 2025. https://www.salon.com/1999/07/16/eyes/
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All images are screenshots from the film.
