Eyes Wide Shut
1999 · Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Original language: English
- drama
- thriller
- mystery
The story
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.
What it’s like
Cool, saturated Christmas-season New York rendered as a dream-logic nightmare: Kubrick's camera glides through long, unhurried takes of mansions, hotel corridors and shop windows, lit by gaslight-warm interiors and bluish winter street glow, with a palette of deep reds, velvets and blacks and an eerie, unresolved sound design built on Jocelyn Pook's hushed, looping strings and piano. The mood is slow-burning unease, a sleepless, sensual dread that drifts toward the surreal, especially in a masked-ball sequence of ritual chanting and bodies in silence. It suits a late night alone with the lights down, or a deliberate, unhurried weekend viewing where you can sit with its long silences. Pacing is languid and deliberately stilted, the emotional register cool and watchful, and the arc follows a comfortable husband whose certainty about his marriage and himself slowly comes apart. Intensity is mostly psychological: sexual content and nudity, some menace, a brief scuffle and a few frightening moments, with no gore. For adults who want an adult, unsettling, art-house mood piece rather than anything gentle.
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