Stanley Kubrick’s movies are focused, pointed masterpieces. They have a message. The writing is careful and direct. Kubrick had famously specific expectations when directing scenes and was known to require 50 or 60 takes to get it exactly how he wanted. Everything in the frame is there for a reason, including a sign in the background or a headline on a newspaper, or car, or an article of clothing, or the time of day.

All of Eyes Wide Shut is well made and the story is engaging but there is a scene in the middle of the movie that took my breath away.

Bill Harford walks into a room in a stranger’s home. The home is quite literally a cathedral, with high vaulted ceilings and clerestory windows. As he enters he hears a deep chanting voice singing in a different language. The room is filled with cloaked, hooded and masked people on the ground floor and in a balcony, encircling a large, red carpeted floor where a dozen others kneel, also cloaked. They circle a man in a red cloak who paces with a staff and a lamp out of which smoke slowly leaks. He chants ominously and harmoniously with a moody synthesizer holding deep brooding chords in a minor key. The kneeling figures stand and remove their cloaks. They are all statuesque, beautiful women, and they are naked. The women kneel again, and in turn lean toward each other, simulating a kiss, their faces still covered by masks. As the red man approaches each of them and taps his cane on the floor they rise.

The scene is so haunting, the music so intense, the ritual so striking. The camera lingers on the audience’s masks and they look sorrowful, staring unmoving at the proceedings. It feels worshipful and dangerous and strange.

Some of you may know that I spent a few years of my life as a member of a church in Seattle that some people would consider cult-like in its beliefs and ways of practicing religion. This scene was the only thing I’ve ever seen on film that successfully captures the intensity of a religious experience.

You know the punchline if you’ve ever heard anything about this movie: we’re at a sex party. The movie explores ideas of fidelity, sex and desire, and the differences between imagination and reality. This is the hardest to write review that I’ve done so far, because I have no idea what the message of this movie is. I just know that it is beautiful, creepy, and powerful.

If there is a metaphor I do understand about Eyes Wide Shut, it isn’t about Stanley Kubrick’s story or the imagery of the film but about its symbolic place in Tom Cruise’s career. This is Cruise’s third movie with Nicole Kidman and their last together – they divorced in 2001. I’ve heard people say that Stanley Kubrick cast them in this movie together because he wanted to fuck with them, and knowing what I do about him and how well their on-screen marriage fits my imagined perception of their real life marriage, I can’t disbelieve it.

Kidman is on fire. That’s all I will say about her performance on social media. Holy shit.

Cruise plays the first half of the movie doing a pretty nuanced Jack Nicholson impersonation – I feel like he must have studied Nicholson’s speech patterns and Kubrick’s dialogue in The Shining when preparing for this role. The great thing about his performance here is you see the classic Cruise confidence and charm early in the film and you get to watch it drip methodically out of him as his character gets more confused and frightened by the events of the plot. It’s interesting that the next 10 roles he took after this one are the most varied uneven of his career, spanning from Frank T.J. Mackey (whom I’m excited to talk about in my next review) to Les Grossman.

I feel that it would be hard to show the vulnerability that Cruise displays in this movie and not be forever changed by it. I think you could argue that the ritual in the scene above and its effect on Bill and Alice Harford’s marriage is mirrored by how Cruise’s relationship with Scientology impacted him and Kidman, or simply that getting naked and making love to your wife in a film about infidelity could make you question what you are doing with your life.

Let me also point out that during the 1990s Tom Cruise made 9 movies. Only one (Far and Away) was bad. Unlike the 1980s where he essentially played the same character in every movie, in the 90s Cruise leveraged his signature charm and realism but applied it to a ton of different genres and characters, including horror, romance, suspense, and action. These are the golden Cruise years.

Next: Magnolia