Hypnotic spiral of erotic dread.

Rating: 10/10 (16 July 1999)

Kubrick attains the apex of a style he helped create-- a brooding, dreamlike cinema with just enough grounding in reality to make its descent all the more disturbing. "Eyes Wide Shut" is a film that penetrates internal mysteries without explaining them; like "2001: A Space Odyssey," it refuses to make any sort of conventional sense. It raises the sort and quality of questions that it would not presume to be able to answer. I found myself thinking of Kieslowski's Three Colors Trilogy-- at the end of their lives, Kubrick and Kieslowski both found everyday existence ephemera, and the mystery supreme.