Film

Eyes Wide Shut

Name: Eyes Wide Shut
Genre: Drama, Thriller, Mystery
Released: 1999
Cast: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Marie Richardson, Rade Šerbedžija

Kubrick's last film is a marriage dissected under fluorescent dread — two hours of Manhattan turned into a hallucination, where every room feels rented and every stranger might be testing you. It moves like a fever, all long corridors and unbearable pauses, more interested in jealousy and shame than in the orgy everyone remembers. Watch it for atmosphere, not answers; it withholds on purpose.

TMDb rating

7.5

If you liked this

Mulholland Drive2001

Lynch's dream-logic noir shares Kubrick's interest in desire as something that dissolves identity rather than explains it. Gorgeous, unsettling, and just as allergic to tidy resolution.

But If Eyes Wide Shut's ambiguity frustrated you, this goes further into deliberate incoherence.

Gone Girl2014

A marriage as a locked room with two unreliable occupants. Fincher's precision-tooled thriller turns domestic secrecy into something genuinely dangerous, with the same cold, controlled surface.

But Plottier and colder than EWS — this one wants you solving it, not floating through it.

Match Point2005

Woody Allen's chilliest film: a moneyed London world where desire and moral consequence collide. Same interest in what wealth and status let people get away with.

But More thriller than dream — the dread is narrative, not atmospheric.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

La Ronde1950

Half a century before Kubrick's masked ball, Ophüls mapped the same idea: a secret network of desire running underneath polite society, one partner leading to the next, everyone complicit and no one quite named.

Max Ophüls' elegant carousel of Viennese lovers passes desire from partner to partner like a baton, narrated by a sardonic ringmaster. Gorgeous, witty, and quietly devastating about how desire moves through a society.

But Talky, theatrical, and structurally circular rather than suspenseful — this is closer to a chamber piece than a thriller.

The Shining1980

Kubrick's other marriage-under-pressure nightmare, this time with a hotel instead of a city. Same hypnotic tracking shots, same sense that reality is quietly coming apart.

But More overtly horror — if you wanted less genre and more ambiguity, this tips the other way.

Basic Instinct1992

Verhoeven's slick, unapologetic erotic thriller, all seduction and danger in equal measure. A pulpier cousin to Kubrick's masked-ball paranoia.

But Where EWS is restrained, this is lurid and proud of it — different pleasures entirely.

Closer2004

Mike Nichols dissects four people's capacity for cruelty and desire with surgical dialogue. Nowhere near as dreamy, but just as interested in what honesty costs a relationship.

But Stagey and dialogue-heavy — the theatrical roots show, and there's no visual dreamscape to get lost in.

Nocturnal Animals2016no page yet

Tom Ford's cold, immaculate revenge fable folds marriage, guilt and violence into something visually hypnotic — a similar sense of dread dressed impeccably.

But The nested structure and stylised violence can feel more like a fashion film with teeth than a character study.

Big Little Lies2017

Wealthy Californians with immaculate homes and terrible secrets — a slower-burn, ensemble take on the idea that the surface of a marriage tells you nothing.

But It's soapier and more plot-driven; the mystery-of-the-week structure trades dream logic for melodrama.

Fatal Attraction1987

The '80s blueprint for infidelity-as-horror. Cruder and more melodramatic, but it shares the bone-deep anxiety that desire, once acted on, doesn't stay contained.

But Broader and pulpier — subtlety was never the point here, and it shows its age.

Belladonna of Sadness1973

Where Kubrick suggests a secret ritual world through cold restraint, this film goes fully inside one, animated rather than filmed, turning the same idea — a hidden order built on sexual power — into raw, unfiltered imagery.

A hallucinatory Japanese animated film about a woman's descent through trauma into supernatural sexual ritual — watercolour nightmares set to psychedelic rock. Genuinely like nothing else you'll see.

But Extremely explicit and formally strange, with pacing closer to a fever dream than a story — not for casual viewing.

Cruising1980no page yet

Same premise stripped of elegance: an ordinary man infiltrates a secretive sexual underworld and can't fully return from it. Kubrick shoots that descent as a cool dream; Friedkin shoots it as a paranoid, sweaty nightmare.

Friedkin's grimy, controversial thriller sends an undercover cop into New York's underground leather-bar scene, and the investigation slowly eats his sense of self. Genuinely unnerving, in a much rougher key.

But It's deliberately sleazy and morally murky, shot with none of Kubrick's polish — this is dread with grit under its fingernails.