---
title: Eyes Wide Shut
type: Movie
date: 2026-04-10
rating: 7
year: 1999
director: Stanley Kubrick
status: Finished
image: eyes-wide-shut.jpg
tags:
  - movie
colorSortKey: [6, 33, 1]
---

![](https://cdn.theasc.com/Eyes-Wide-Shut-A.jpg)

> If you men only knew.

At this point, *Eyes Wide Shut* has so thoroughly permeated the zeitgeist that it's hard to disentangle my reaction to the film from my reaction to the world the film has spawned. It's rife with metatext — and that's not even getting into the Rothschild mansion stuff, as interesting as all of that is. It perhaps speaks poorly of me, but I had to be reminded that during filming, Kidman and Cruise were married, and that a year after its release they were divorced; I had to be reminded that this is technically an adaptation, too, and as is always the case with Kubrick what seems like masterful creation is more like masterful selection.

My vague perception of the film going in was that it was viewed as somewhat Lynchian — or at least operating in the same realm of symbology as *2001: A Space Odyssey*: deep interpretations, emphasis on vibes. Some of tghat is true, but I actually feel as though very little of the film is genuinely ambiguous, and the things that *are* ambiguous are unimportant. Here would be my layman's read of the plot:

- Cruise and Kidman are conventionally successful, happy people, albeit somewhat repressed in the same way many 1999 film protagonists are.
- Cruise's sense of identity is inadvertently shattered when he grapples with the fact that Kidman is not a wife whom he has objectified but a living, breathing human with impulses and dreams — even if she'd never want those impulses and dreams to be tangible.
- What follows is a dark night of the soul, and he discovers that the world he thought mapped and well-known contains to it secrets and evil which he had conveniently [^1] overlooked.
- The morning comes, and after failed attempts to re-enter the night he returns to his wife, and is for the first time earnest and honest with her. This does not solve the problems of the world, but it leaves them changed — and better for it.

The film opens with Kidman nude; it ends with her clothed but telling Cruise, quite literally, that they should fuck. I think the discrepancy between these two images is more than anything else what Kubrick is trying to say, about the relationship between intimacy and nudity (or, if you'd like, between transparency and understanding.)

---

Beyond that, the secret society sequences felt kind of pat in a way I can't really hold against the film. The imagery was gorgeous — almost all of Kubrick's successors have failed to match it — but I knew what they were going to be, and besides on a visual level (the confrontation scene!) they no longer hold a shock or awe that I'm sure they did in the 1999 dreamscape.

More than anything else, I'm happy to have watched a film I found strange and flawed, a little overlong, but worth seeing on its own merits — and not just as a reference text.

[^1]: His treatment of Mandy is a bit of a lodestar.