When Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was released in the summer of 1999, the world shrugged. Critics didn’t know what to do with it, treating it less like the final statement of a master filmmaker and more like a bootlegged work print — understandable, given that Kubrick, who typically fussed over his movies until the last possible second, had died that March, just days after delivering a semi-finished cut to Warner Bros. The studio and his estate made the remaining tweaks. Meanwhile, audiences had been primed by the marketing to expect an explicit, boundary-pushing erotic thriller featuring an extended orgy sequence that almost triggered an NC-17 rating. What they got instead was much tamer: a slow-motion marital drama about a Manhattan doctor (Tom Cruise), rattled by his wife’s (Nicole Kidman) confession of an adulterous fantasy, who drifts through a series of lustful but unconsummated encounters before crashing a masked sex party thrown by an elite secret society in a Long Island mansion. The film’s dreamlike atmosphere veered toward the surreal, with Cruise and Kidman doing the weirdest acting of their lives and the orgygoers’ portrayal — the masks, the password, the choreography — striking many viewers as more goofy than sexy or sinister.
But Kubrick’s movies have a habit of aging into new meanings, like monoliths that take time for us apes to figure out, and Eyes Wide Shut eventually came to be seen in a different light. Beyond the orgy, there are subtler, more disturbing moments — including a scene in which a costume-shop owner appears to offer his underage daughter to Cruise’s character — that hint at a world where sex, power, and predation blur. With hindsight, those undertones seemed to foreshadow real-world horrors to come. In the 2010s, Pizzagate and QAnon dragged rumors of elite sex-trafficking rings from the fringes into the mainstream of American paranoia. Then came Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest and death, and suddenly an underappreciated film from two decades earlier started to look like an uncanny premonition.
