Eyes Wide Shut [R]

One winter night, Dr. William Harford, a fine and happily married New Yorker is plunged into an erotic foray that threatens his marriage and may even ensnare him into a strange and lurid murder mystery, after his wife Alice admits to him of her sexual longings and, in jealous uncertainty, he winds up at a strange place that he should never have gone to in the first place. 

Thanks Kubrick, I’m going to be haunted by people in masks and black cloaks for the next week! The Shining was great because it freaked me out as a horror, fair play and job done. Lolita moved slowly but its stars’ performances kept me captivated. 2001 I found amazing but at the same time just downright strange. And now we have Eyes Wide Shut, a film that has made me realise that, although he really is a master filmmaker, I just cannot process or handle Kubrick. At the end of two and a half hours, this movie left me confused, frightened, and a little sick in my stomach. I do not deny that it was another Kubrick classic: haunting and violently startling, but it just made me feel numb and bit repulsed. This may even be the first review where I say that it’s not the film… it’s me. 

One fateful winter night, Dr. William Harford, a fine married New Yorker is plunged into an erotic foray that threatens his marriage and may even ensnare him into a strange murder mystery, after his wife Alice admits to him of her sexual longings and, in jealous uncertainty, he winds up in a strange place that he should never had been near in the first place. 

Watching this movie, it occurred to me that Kubrick is a filmmaker a little like Hitchcock, although Kubrick does tend to cross the line between what thrills and what sickens. Like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in Eyes Wide Shut we are given a scenario; we know what we’ve seen and heard, and then we spend the rest of the movie forming our own thrilling and terrible conclusions, scaring ourselves massively in the process. 

The film’s lack of characters and its recurring piano piece, which really does make everything the scarier and will probably haunt me for a fortnight, makes Kubrick’s final film a real haunting and unforgettable one. 

Starring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Todd Field, Julienne Davis, Marie Richardson, Vinessa Shaw, Rade Serbedzija, and Alan Cumming, Eyes Wide Shut was a spine-tingling and captivatingly twisted film that was filled with sex, charades, dreams, longing, frustration, uncertainty, and uh sex. A powerful film that strikes a violent blow to its audience members, it’s a movie that I can see the brilliance of, but simply could not handle.