'Eyes Wide Shut,' a sex movie with a strange relationship to sex, turns 25

Stanley Kubrick’s final film, released in 1999, was hyped as one of the most sexually explicit Hollywood movies ever made, but the reality was very different.

In Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the married lead characters, played by then-married couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, spend a great deal of time flirting, talking about sex, talking about cheating, and stepping right up to the line of both. In one scene, it’s hinted that they’re about to, and then in another, they just did.

But what they don’t do is have sex with each other or with anyone else. Yes, there is sex in the movie, especially in the infamous cult orgy scene, at least in the parts that aren’t blocked out by MPAA-mandated hooded figures. 

Eyes Wide Shut came out in July of 1999, 25 years ago this week, just over four months after Kubrick’s death at age 70. Adapted loosely from Traumnovelle, a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler, it was described in the advanced marketing as “a tale of jealousy and sexual obsession,” which was one of the only bits of that marketing that turned out to be true. 

Possibly because it was marketed as something it wasn’t, Eyes Wide Shut was a flop at the time, and many critics were baffled by it. But like much of Kubrick’s work, it’s become more appreciated over time than it was upon arrival.

If you haven't already, I recommend listening to Karina Longworth’s “Erotic ‘90s” series on You Must Remember This for the background. But during the long three years that Eyes Wide Shut was in production, most of what was reported about the film indicated that it would be the most sexually explicit thing anyone had ever seen—a hype cycle that has repeated itself with Don’t Worry Darling and many other movies over the years.