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 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 yet totally unerotic portrayals of consensual sex in mainstream cinema.

Critical reaction to the film 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 a director/actor on the film, Sydney Pollack, did it.

The film was based on the novel Traumnovelle by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. The screenplay was adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael.

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