Stanley Kubrick died of a heart attack six days after screening Eyes Wide Shut for Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Warner Bros. executives. That biographical fact hovers over the film and is difficult to entirely separate from the experience of watching it. This film is a product of pure obsession. It resists easy viewing and does not care about being accessible.
It is, by any measure, a strange film. Set in a nocturnal, hermetically sealed version of 1990s New York—though shot entirely on Pinewood Studios soundstages in England, which explains its slightly unreal, theatrical quality—it follows Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) through a marital crisis that begins with a confession and ends with a question the film refuses to answer.
The confession is Alice’s. In a marijuana-loosened moment, she tells Bill that she once saw a naval officer at a hotel and felt, with a sudden violent certainty, that she would have left him: their marriage, their daughter, everything, to sleep with this stranger. Nothing happened. The feeling passed. But the confession doesn’t.
It detonates something in Bill, and the film spends the next two hours in the wreckage. A nocturnal odyssey through s**ual temptation, class anxiety, and the discovery that the world contains rooms he has never been invited into.
What Kubrick is really examining is the gap between what we admit to and what we feel. That gap, in a long marriage, can become its own kind of distance. Bill’s journey through a high-end prostitute’s apartment, a jazz club, an elaborately staged secret society orgy at a country mansion is less about infidelity than about a man encountering, for the first time, the full complexity of his own desires and those of the woman he thought he knew completely. He has moved through the world with the unexamined confidence of a man whose social position has always smoothed the way. It stops working here.
Cruise is better in this film than he is usually given credit for. The role requires him to be reactive rather than dominant; to play confusion and inadequacy rather than capability. And he manages it with a restraint that suits the film’s dreamlike tone. Kidman, in what is essentially a smaller role, is considerably more interesting. The marijuana confession scene, and a late-film speech about dreams that is one of the most quietly disturbing things Kubrick ever put on screen. These are where the film’s emotional temperature is highest. She plays Alice as a woman who understands something about desire that her husband doesn’t, and probably never will.
The controversial orgy sequence is less erotic than ceremonial. Kubrick shoots it with the same cool detachment he brings to everything, which is exactly what makes it unsettling. These are people for whom money has removed every obstacle except boredom, and they have constructed an elaborate theatre to manage that boredom. Bill doesn’t belong here. The film makes that humiliatingly clear.
The ending, which critics at the time called ‘conventional,’ is more ambiguous than it first appears. Alice’s assurance that they should “be grateful for what they have” reads, in Kidman’s delivery, less as resolution than as a decision: a choice to stop pulling at a thread which if pulled far enough, would unravel everything. Is it wisdom or surrender? That’s up for debate.
Eyes Wide Shut is not a comfortable watch. It is a film about the lives we construct around our desires rather than from them; about the marriages we perform and the interior lives we keep hidden, even from ourselves. There are unanswered questions swept under the carpet. But Kubrick’s film stays with you. Long after tidier, more obedient films have faded, this one keeps returning. In the quality of its light, in Kidman’s face in that confession scene, in the question it refuses to answer.
Where to Watch: Netflix
(Edited by Mitch Farrell)
Originally published on Feb 26, 2020. Updated June 12, 2026 with fresh details and additional context.
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