Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.
Eyes Wide Shut is visually sumptuous — Kubrick's final film is bathed in a hypnotic, dreamlike cinematography marked by Christmas lights, theatrical interiors, and a suffocating slowness that is wholly his own. The Novelty is equally high: no other filmmaker could have made this film, and its psychosexual meditation on desire, jealousy, and bourgeois anxiety is utterly singular in tone and conception. Acting is competent but divisive — Cruise and Kidman are adequate rather than revelatory, and the stilted line readings, intentional or not, read as a mixed asset. The plot is deliberately elliptical and somnambulant, functioning more as a mood piece than a thriller, which some find profound and others find frustratingly thin — above average but not exceptional. The ending is the film's weakest element: the deflating, almost bathetic resolution ('fuck') feels rushed and tonally abrupt, undercutting the slow-burn dread that preceded it.