Eyes Wide Shut Review

The premise is domestic and small. A wealthy doctor learns that his wife once considered leaving him for a stranger she never spoke to, and spends a night walking into rooms where sex is offered and never quite happens, each one lit by the Christmas trees Kubrick puts in almost every interior. Nicole Kidman's marijuana monologue is the best scene, an actress dismantling her husband's certainty in one unbroken stretch, and Kubrick never gives the film anything that equals it.

The mansion sequence is the famous part and the weakest, ritualised and stately where it needs menace, and in America it was released with digital figures inserted to obscure the frame, an insult to a film about looking. Tom Cruise is opaque in a role that needs porousness, which may be intentional and still costs the middle hour. The New York rebuilt in England never quite convinces. The last word is a punchline that reads as either profound or a shrug, and both readings are honest.