Download Eyes Wide Shut script PDF for personal, private use here.

There's something about Kubrick's films that demands close analysis. It’s an immensely rare trait and one that filmmakers since him have tried to emulate usually to no avail. Some shoot for obscurity, hoping lack of clarity breeds discourse, while others aim to move audiences so deeply that they indefinitely turn the film over in their mind. Still others go for shock tactics, hurling their films at you in such a violent, lewd or horrifying way that images get permanently imprinted. Kubrick told ostensibly interesting and entertaining stories in his films. Though lauded by auteurs from every corner of the globe, he wasn't overtly arthouse, always committing to the entertainment value in each film as strongly as to the rich psychological and thematic undercurrents. But something is always off about the way he unfolds his plots and character arcs.

Eyes Wide Shut in its bare bones is most reminiscent of a Woody Allen drama: a wealthy New York couple explore their marriage and how it relates to their individual understandings of trust and sexuality. Out of pubescent curiosity and masculine insecurity at his wife's admission of fantasizing about another man, the husband stumbles into a cultish orgy in a grand house in New York State, temporarily losing himself in a terrifying and intensely seductive fantasy before crash landing on earth, shaken, lost but ultimately ready to return to his wife’s arms and to the reassuring, consuming warmth of marriage, family and sex with the woman he has committed himself to. But when Kubrick tells this story it's just a completely unique animal. The film plays out at a crawl, each shot languishing on the beauty of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and the world they inhabit, until you can hardly look anymore. The dialogue rolls out like treacle and the fabric of the world takes on a dreamy haze, inducing a feeling in which the lens and the viewers' eyes are the only things that seem real. The orgy sequence itself is unrelentingly hypnotic and just like Cruise's character you retrospectively start to question how much of what you remember actually happened.

Kubrick died a week after seeing the final cut, presumably safe in the knowledge that he was leaving people with his most enigmatic film to date. For my money, it’s also his finest. A dizzying, compelling and frightening picture that bleeds its way into your mind as you watch and stays with you a very long time.

EveryFilmIWatch is multi-channel film review project run by Sebastian Cox, ScriptUp co-founder. Further reviews can be found on Instagram.

Eyes Wide Shut (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1999) - EveryFilmIWatch Review