film

Kubrick’s final film, 1999's Eyes Wide Shut stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Bill and Alice Harford, a wealthy New York couple whose apparently comfortable marriage is rocked when Alice confesses to having fantasised about another man. Consumed by jealousy and insecurity, Bill embarks on a nocturnal odyssey through the city’s sexual underworld, culminating in a mysterious masked gathering.

Adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, the film unfolds like a bizarre dream, with deliberately artificial sets, hypnotic pacing and Christmas lights and decorations imbuing Manhattan with an uncanny, otherworldly atmosphere. Kubrick’s cool, meticulously controlled direction leaves the boundary between fantasy and reality deliciously unclear.