The Eyes Wide Shut Conspiracy

"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."

"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,"

"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."

Eyes Wide Shut opened in summer 1999 to a muted response as critics treated it like an unfinished work after Kubrick's death and the studio's last-minute tweaks. Marketing promised an explicit erotic thriller, but the film delivered a slow, dreamlike marital drama centered on a Manhattan doctor whose wife's confession unsettles him and sends him through unconsummated sexual encounters and a masked orgy hosted by an elite secret society. The film's surreal tone and odd performances made many viewers find the orgy more goofy than menacing. Subtler scenes hint at blurred lines among sex, power, and predation, and later conspiracies and the Jeffrey Epstein case intensified those readings.

Read at Vulture