Kubrick's final masterwork: a haunting, compelling nightmare

Rating: 10/10 (27 July 2007)

Due to the advertising and rumors surrounding the plot (not to mention the stunt-casting of real-life husband and wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as the central married couple) most people expected this film, Stanley Kubrick's last picture, to be an explicit story of sex and adultery. I expected it too, to be honest. I couldn't have been more wrong: Eyes Wide Shut is one of the coldest, most unsettling studies of love and betrayal ever made, one that acquires new meanings as the years go by.
Set in New York (but actually shot in London), the film's bizarre chain of events starts at a party, a typical Kubrickian context, where Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise) and his spouse Alice (Kidman) are among the guests. While his wife elegantly tells a suitor to get lost, Bill is asked to help the host (played with eerie charm by Sydney Pollack) revive a naked girl who has accidentally OD:d in a bathroom. Though visibly shocked by these events, the physician returns home and calmly follows his usual routine. One night, however, an argument between him and Alice leads to the latter revealing she fantasized about sleeping with another man during a holiday. Stunned by the cruelly honest confession, Bill leaves the house and spends the rest of the night wandering around, the image of his wife having an affair prompting him to seek revenge: at first he considers having sex with a prostitute, then he decides to attend a party a friend told him about, only to run into something bigger than imagined and almost risk his life.
Superficially, Eyes Wide Shut can be considered a sex film, but it is in fact much deeper: with only one actual "sex" scene (apart from the infamous orgy sequence and Bill's visions) in the whole movie, the focus is more on what love and commitment imply and demand. Naturally, being this a Kubrick film, no happiness should be expected: so chilling it actually makes Mike Nichols' Closer look like a comedy, EWS leaves no room for comfort or relief, the cynical closing line being the definitive punch in the stomach for anyone hoping things would go differently.
Moreover, the wonderfully strange title suggests this movie might be the one that most reflects the director's view on cinema: film is like a dream. In this case, it is a frightening nightmare, and even though there are clues that seem to prove Bill's harrowing experience took place in his mind alone the ghostly atmosphere never leaves.
Scariest of all, though, are the fearless anti-performances Cruise and Kidman deliver: combining the original script with whatever problems they might have had at the time (one should keep in mind their divorce was finalized less than two years after the movie's release), they expose the darkest sides of marriage with a brutal sincerity that clearly indicates there is no, or very little, acting involved. And while Cruise used his role and that of Frank Mackey in Magnolia (his best work to date) to prove he could handle more difficult characters, Kidman's surprisingly raw portrayal of disappointment and secret lust was the first of many parts (Moulin Rouge!, The Hours and Dogville in particular) that showed the world she was actually a great actress and not just the Top Gun star's wife.
With its layered thematic content, expert execution and brave cast, Eyes Wide Shut is a fascinating last film from one of cinema's undisputed masters, and like all other Kubrick pictures it repays repeated viewings like few are able to. A little warning, nevertheless: it is not recommended if you get nightmares easily.