In an early scene in Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, Bill (played by a subdued Tom Cruise) discovers a jazz club where a former friend of his from medical school is playing.
As Bill descends a flight of stairs into the ethereally lit club, he passes a flurry of signs on the wall, with one in particular standing out: All Exits Are Final. It’s a heavy-handed message in an otherwise inscrutable film.
After all, Eyes Wide Shut is all about seeking entry into other worlds and learning too late that you’ve passed a point of no return.
Likewise, since Kubrick died less than a week after screening the film for the first time, it serves as a morbid yet apt summary for his own legacy and especially the lasting impact of his final movie.
It’s been twenty-five years since Eyes Wide Shut hit theaters. Technically, its official anniversary was this past July, but since it’s most decidedly a Christmas movie (there are seriously swaths of holiday trees in this film), this seems like the perfect time of year to explore one of cinema’s most underrated existential horror films.
Yes, I said a horror film. While nobody considered Eyes Wide Shut a genre film during its initial release, its legacy is akin to the best cerebral horror films out there.
With its unsettling urban landscape, dangerous mysteries, and overall weird tone, it’s the most Lynchian film you’ll ever see that wasn’t directed by David Lynch himself.
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- Photo Credit: Still from 'Eyes Wide Shut' via Warner Bros.
This film is something of a secret, a cinematic puzzle box that’s impossible to crack. The basic setup starts off simply enough: then-married stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play Bill and Alice, a couple who attend a holiday party at the house of a wealthy friend.
Afterward, they get high and start talking about sex. But things take a surprising turn when Alice reveals an extramarital fantasy that sends Bill into an emotional tailspin, leading to his solo excursion across the bitter landscape of NYC, and ultimately culminating in him attending an enigmatic masquerade party that devolves into one of cinema’s strangest orgies.
Arguably more than any other Kubrick film, Eyes Wide Shut’s meaning and message are as opaque as the Manhattan midnight in which it’s set. I have written about this film before, as recently as last month’s Holiday Horror list, and I have no doubt I’ll write about it again.
It lends itself to repeated viewings, and it’s only become more complex and at times horrifyingly relevant as the years go on.
There’s probably no way of talking about a Stanley Kubrick film without also discussing the man himself. By now, it’s common knowledge that Kubrick was often a cruel and petty tyrant on his sets.
He’s been rightly criticized by his actors (Shelley Duvall famously suffered hair loss from the repeated takes and miserable conditions during The Shining).
In terms of Eyes Wide Shut, it stretched into an interminably long shoot, marking a Guinness World Record for the longest continual production. That being said, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have both gone on the record saying that they enjoyed the process of making the film.
There’s also a story that floats around the internet that it was Kubrick himself that discouraged Kidman from giving up her acting career in favor of focusing on her family.
“You owe it to your talent not to stop,” he allegedly told her.
As mentioned above, this is a Christmas film, but it’s not a very Christian film. Virtually all the symbols of the season are more pagan in origin, namely trees and stars.
And there are seriously Christmas trees to spare in this movie. They pervade nearly every scene, lighting the background in beautiful yet almost eerie colors. You might not find another film where basic holiday décor seems quite so uncanny.
Furthermore, this dizzying sense of weirdness is everywhere. At one point, Tom Cruise is supposed to be walking on a Manhattan street, but it’s fairly clear that he’s really strolling in front of a screen where the city is only being projected behind him.
Part of this choice was simply a practical one: Kubrick lived in England and was deathly afraid of flying. He couldn’t—or at the very least wouldn’t—travel to New York to shoot the scene in person.
But for a movie all about fantasy and the real world, artifice and truth, the unreality of the Big Apple in Eyes Wide Shut only lends to its pervading sense of dread.
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- Photo Credit: Still from 'Eyes Wide Shut' via Warner Bros.
This is also a decidedly somnambulant film—and I mean that in the very best way. From Bill and Alice’s uncomfortable heart-to-heart in their New York apartment to the lascivious partygoers at the masquerade ball, everyone seems to be sleepwalking through or awakening from a dream.
For a movie with eyes right there in the title, you can bet that’s no accident.
Time has been fairly kind to Eyes Wide Shut. Despite its initially chilly reception from critics, fans have given it a second look over the years, rediscovering it as one of Kubrick’s most complicated and fascinating works.
Perhaps it’s only fitting that a movie about a creepy cult ultimately developed its own cult following.
In the film’s final scene, Alice tellingly says to Bill that they’re awake now. By all appearances, their marriage is going to survive and might even end up stronger because of the events of the film.
It’s at once a cynical ending as well as an oddly happy one. At least in their little corner of the world, order has been restored. They know they can’t go backward, so instead, they’re marching forward, which in the context of the film is undoubtedly a good thing.
Because as Eyes Wide Shut already taught us, all exits are indeed final.
