Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 film directed by Stanley Kubrick (who completed editing the film just before his death) and starring real-life husband and wife (at the time) Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. The film was based on the novel Traumnovelle by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. The screenplay was adapted by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Kubrick had long been interested in doing a film version of Schniztler's story; at one point he apparently considered adapting it as a comedy, with Steve Martin in the lead role.

The theme music of the film is "Waltz 2" from Shostakovich's Jazz Suite 2.

After a famously long shooting schedule (during which co-stars Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh dropped out, to be replaced by Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson, respectively), the film was released in July of 1999. Critical reaction was mixed, some hailing the film as another Kubrick masterpiece but other critics and audiences regarded the film as pretentious, tedious, and meaningless tripe that was all technique and no soul. Some experts on film say that Kubrick actually did not finish the shooting, but died near the end, and that Pollack brought the film to completion.

Warning: Spoilers follow

The storyline follows the surreal, possibly imagined, sexual adventures and misadventures of a husband who discovers his wife has had an affair (or merely fantasized about it), ending up with his sneaking in to a bizarre orgy held in a mysterious castle, in a sequence with some of the most explicit portrayals of consensual sex in mainstream cinema.