Eyes Wide Shut will be remembered as the legendary Stanley Kubrick’s final film, completed in his lifetime but released a few months after his death, as well as his biggest box office hit. The movie’s subject matter, cultural significance, and psychological depth all contribute to its outstanding cinematic value.
The story starts with a doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) going to a party in NYC. As both get hit on by members of opposite sex at the party, their bedroom chat opens a psychological tunnel for Bill that passes through some disturbing revelations regarding human intimacy in various settings. Bill crosses path with possible death in more than physical sense and emerges as a changed person on the inside. Or does he?
A mystery and psychological drama at its core, Eyes Wide Shut has been tagged as an erotic thriller on movie database sites like IMDb. But it’s far from the familiar erotic thriller material that is widely known to have its fan base. Kubrik has employed nudity and explicit imagery as supportive material to engage the viewer in the main story, the mystery of intimacy in relationship and its distance from mere sexual gratification. The ritualistic sex ceremony sequence has been the subject of much speculation regarding the existence of such cults among us in contemporary societies. Its presence (or fantasy) draws the attention to the cultural mainstream of marriage and street hookups against secret scenarios hiding in plain sight.
Eyes Wide Shut progresses with a natural pace and steadily in sync with the protagonist’s journey. Instead of working as a traditional mystery that is solved at the end of the story, it is left open-ended. Cruise loosely fits the doctor character but Kidman and some other supporting actors have done well in their respective roles. The ending scene comes as an unusual almost random shot at changing the mood of the narration. The studio is said to have completed the editing since Kubrik passed just four days after presenting the producers with his cut of the movie. It would surely be worth one’s time to see Kubrik’s final cut as a director.
