Eyes Wide Shut (4K UHD Review)
Director
Stanley KubrickRelease Date(s)
1999 (November 25, 2025)Studio(s)
Warner Bros. (The Criterion Collection – Spine #1290)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: A-
Review
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
– Edgar Allan Poe
The subject of dream states isn’t a common thread throughout Stanley Kubrick’s filmography (a few bizarre fan theories notwithstanding), but it’s something that fascinated him ever since he first read Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle (aka Rhapsody: A Dream Novel and Dream Story). Yet there were many subjects that fascinated Kubrick, some of which he managed to immortalize onscreen, and others like his long-gestating Napoleon project that never came to fruition. His meticulous nature meant that he was only going to make a relatively small number of films during his lifetime, and the gaps between each of them grew longer and longer as he grew older. Traumnovelle always ended up on the backburner in favor of other projects.
After finishing Full Metal Jacket in 1987, he worked on developing multiple films that never got off the ground, but he eventually circled back to the book that had obsessed him for decades. His adaptation finally went before the cameras in November of 1996 in what was planned as a three-month shoot, but Kubrick being Kubrick, the legendarily troubled production would take nearly three full years before it finally reached theatres in July of 1999—which was a four full months after he passed away on March 7, 1999. The dream states that had fascinated him for so long would prove to the last subject that he ever addressed.
Kubrick worked on his adaptation with Two for the Road screenwriter Frederic Raphael. The novella was set during the Mardis Gras in early 20th century Vienna, but Kubrick and Raphael decided to update it to Christmastime in present-day New York City. (Kubrick still being Kubrick, the majority of the film ended up being filmed on soundstages in England instead.) The entire story could be a dream, or even a dream within a dream, with the characters unable to trust the evidence of their own eyes, and viewers of the film sharing in their uncertainty.
The act of seeing has long been a crucial component of Kubrick’s work, from HAL’s dispassionate spying on Dave Bowman and Frank Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey to Private Pyle’s equally silent but far more intense gaze in Full Metal Jacket—and in every case, Kubrick’s camera is observing the observers, making viewers not just complicit in the characters’ voyeurism, but adding in layers of their own voyeurism as well. In Eyes Wide Shut, the characters watch themselves in mirrors, with Kubrick’s camera looking over their shoulders and watching them watch themselves. Reality blends with fantasy, and the clarity of vision blends with the imprecision of dreams, making impartial observation impossible.
Everything that occurs during the course of Eyes Wide Shut is set in motion when Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) attend a lavish Christmas ball hosted by Bill’s wealthy patient Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). During the party, Bill flirts shamelessly with a couple of young ladies, while Alice has a bit too much to drink and ends up in a seductive dance with an elderly Hungarian gentleman (Sky du Mont). The next day, when they’re both relaxing at home with a bit of the unholy weed, Alice starts to question whether or not Bill wanted to sleep with the young ladies. He assures her that nothing could be farther from his mind, but when discussing the man she was dancing with, he points out (somewhat self-incriminatingly) that men are always trying to get inside women’s pants. But he wants to assure her that he trusts her implicitly since he believes that women are different, which infuriates Alice:
“Millions of years of evolution, right? Right? Men have to stick it in every place they can, but for women—women it is just about security and commitment and whatever the fuck else!”
“A little oversimplified, Alice, but yes, something like that.”
“If you men only knew...”
So, she tells him. She relates a story about encountering a naval officer and being so driven by lust that she would have slept with him if she had the chance. Bill has bought into the stereotype that men want sex and women want security, so he’s ignorant regarding the full spectrum of human sexuality, and he never expected to hear that kind of confession from his wife. He’s been freely flirting with other women and having fantasies about them, but he’s driven mad by the thought that his wife may have fantasies of her own—not that she’s acted on them, but simply that she’s had them. For Bill, her dreams end up eating into his version of reality.
Everything that follows is the result of his inability to accept his misunderstandings about female desire: his awkward interaction with the daughter of one of his patients (Marie Richardson); his aborted dalliance with the prostitute Domino (Vinessa Shaw); his strange experience with a costume store owner (Rade Šerbedžija) and the owner’s Lolita of a young daughter (Leelee Sobieski); and his dealings with Ziegler’s sexual conquest Mandy (Julienne Davis). Most fatefully, it results in his chance encounter with former fellow medical student and current lounge performer Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), which leads to Bill’s misadventures at a remote estate where costumed guests engage in stylized sexual acts that he was never intended to witness. Bill’s obsession with his wife’s dreams of infidelity have led him to living in a waking dream state that may (or may not) end up putting his life in danger.
Much has been made of the unreality of the orgies held by this secret society, and as orgies go, there’s no denying that this is a particularly unerotic one. But that’s beside the point. All of Eyes Wide Shut exists in a reality of its own, from the not entirely convincing New York City street set to the bizarre nature of its denizens that Bill encounters (including a continuity error where two different nude women play the same masked role at the estate, their bodies visibly changing from shot to shot). Kubrick was meticulous, but his attention to detail wasn’t necessarily in service of reproducing reality, but rather of creating worlds (real or otherwise). The world of Eyes Wide Shut is the world of dreams, for good or for ill, and the only way to stay alive is to open your eyes and see beyond your dreams, as Alice explains to Bill:
“What do I think? I don’t know. Maybe, I think we should be grateful. Grateful, that we’ve managed to survive through all of our adventures, whether they were real, or only a dream.”
“Are you sure, of that?”
“Am—am I sure? Um... oh, only... only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth.”
“And no dream is ever... just a dream.”
“Hmm. The important thing is, we’re awake now. And, hopefully, for a long time to come.”
She then offers him a simple but elegant solution to determining whether or not they’re living in a waking state, ending Eyes Wide Shut with an unforgettable closing line (closing word, actually), and ending Stanley Kubrick’s career on a surprisingly cheeky note. Bill’s misadventures may or may not have been a dream, but either way, it’s significant that he was unable to participate in any of the dreamlike shenanigans that he witnessed (or just imagined). You are not wrong, who deem, that our days have been a dream, but in Eyes Wide Shut, true vitality is found in the chthonic earthiness of sexual reality.
Cinematographer Larry Smith shot Eyes Wide Shut on 35mm film using Arriflex 535B cameras with spherical Zeiss Super Speed Tl.3 and T2.1 lenses (most of the film was shot using an 18mm lens). Steadicam work utilized a Moviecam SL camera instead, which Smith says constituted as much as half of the finished film. Everything was framed at 1.85:1 for theatrical release—and yes, that’s the ratio that Kubrick intended. Smith also supervised this new master, which is based on 4K scans of the 35mm camera negative (the uncut international version, not the censored R-rated North American cut), with digital image restoration handled by Resilion in New York. A 35mm print held by Warner Bros. was used as a color reference, with Company 3 in London handling the grading (both Dolby Vision and HDR10 grades are included). While the disc was authored on a BD-100 by NexSpec, the film itself was encoded by David Mackenzie at Fidelity in Motion—more on that in a moment.
While Kubrick toyed with adapting the f0.7 Zeiss lenses that he had used to shoot the candlelight scenes in Barry Lyndon, faster modern film stocks made that unnecessary. Yet he and Smith still employed an unusual shooting strategy for Eyes Wide Shut by rating the film stock faster than recommended and then force-developing the negative two stops in the lab. Smith told American Cinematographer that they tested Kodak’s new Vision 500T stock, but it wasn’t amenable to force-developing, so they went back to Kodak’s 500 ASA 5298 stock instead. That had already been discontinued, but Kodak was able to provide enough raw stock to cover however many takes that Kubrick wanted to do. The idea was to facilitate low light shooting and create a specific mood, but for consistency’s sake, everything was force-developed, daylight exteriors included. (As an aside, Smith also said that Kubrick was an avid reader of American Cinematographer!)
All of that is necessary context in order to understand the intended look for Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick loved using practical light sources, and the combination of the on-set lights that Smith set up and the force developing created a distinctive, warm glow for the film, with highlights that verged on being blown out, and a clearly visible grain structure. Pretty much none of those effects came through properly on the previous DVD and Blu-ray masters, which erased the grain and offered inconsistent colors and black levels. The aspect ratio also varied between open-matte 1.33:1 and 1.78:1 (don’t get me started on that subject). So, how does this version look, in Kubrick’s intended ratio, with Smith having supervised a proper digital mastering?
In a word, stunning. While this is still a digital version of the film, it’s as if a digital veil has been lifted, revealing all of the glories of the analogue film elements that lay behind them. Proper filmic textures have been restored, with the grain prominent throughout but handled perfectly by the encode. (Grain is one element where Mackenzie has always been able to work wonders, so hopefully Criterion’s first foray into using FiM won’t be their last.) You’re not necessarily going to find true 4K levels of detail here thanks to the way that the film was shot, but every last bit of pictorial information possible has been wrung from the negative. Fortunately, Kubrick’s insistence on avoiding optical degradation means that the fades and dissolves in Eyes Wide Shut were printed on A/B roll instead of having optical dupes cut into the camera negative, so there aren’t any issues with inconsistent image quality.
The warm glow that Kubrick and Smith intended has been reproduced perfectly, with those highlights really shining (no pun intended) but never overwhelming the image. The bold color scheme of Eyes Wide Shut has also been reproduced perfectly, with those distinctive warm oranges and cool blues contrasting each other beautifully. The deep reds (still no pun intended) of the estate and Ziegler’s pool table are also particularly striking. Kubrick worked with Deluxe U.K. to get the exact color effects that he wanted, and absent from any reference material of my own, there’s no legitimate reason to question how the grading has been done here. (The scans of a 35mm print that are available online aren’t definitive proof of what’s correct either, since there’s no guarantee that they were produced any more accurately.) In terms of reproducing the look of film, this is a reference-quality transfer.
Audio is offered in English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English SDH subtitles. Eyes Wide Shut was released theatrically in 5.1, and this version has been remastered from the original 35mm magnetic tracks by Criterion. While there’s some light ambient and directional effects during the street scenes, for the most part the focus is on the dialogue and the music, both of which are crystal-clear—in fact, much more so than the old 5.1 track on the Warner Bros. Blu-ray. It’s also like a veil has been lifted from the audio. It’s still a fairly basic mix, but the music in particular is now much more potent than it was before, from the minimalist score by Joceylyn Pook to the various pieces of Kubrick’s beloved source music.
The Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD release of Eyes Wide Shut is a three-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film and a second Blu-ray with all of the extras. The insert features new artwork that’s based on an original poster design by Katharina Kubrick and Christiane Kubrick. There’s also a 30-page booklet featuring an essay by Megan Abbott and a newly translated reprint of a 1999 French interview with Sydney Pollack. The following extras are included on the third disc only:
- Larry Smith (HD – 24:48)
- Lisa Leone (HD – 19:40)
- Georgina Orgill (HD – 15:50)
- Christiane Kubrick (HD – 9:37)
- Never Just a Dream: Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut (HD – 8:53)
- Director’s Guild of America Speech (Upscaled SD – 4:03)
- Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Jan Harlan (Upscaled SD – 36:26)
- Lost Kubrick: The Unfinished Films of Stanley Kubrick (Upscaled SD – 20:22)
- Kubrick Remembered (HD – 83:16)
- Promos:
- ShoWest Convention Trailer (HD – 1:34)
- Theatrical Trailer (HD – 1:09)
- TV Spots (HD – 5:13, 8 in all)
The extras kick off with three new interviews conducted by Criterion. Larry Smith talks about his first experience with Stanley Kubrick working on Barry Lyndon and The Shining, as well as the process of shooting Eyes Wide Shut. He covers the film stocks, push processing, grain levels, lenses, and the Steadicam work by Liz Zielger. He also gives his thoughts about how the original 35mm prints were graded and how thrilled that he was to be able to work on the new grade. Lisa Leone served as pre-production photographer, set decorator, second unit director, and an actor on Eyes Wide Shut, and she discusses her background and her own experiences making the film. (She shot the location footage in New York.) Georgina Orgill is an archivist at the University of the Arts London, and she describes some of the materials in the Stanley Kubrick archives, including the ones that document his lengthy journey in bringing Traumnovelle to the screen.
There’s also one archival interview with Christiane Kubrick that was filmed in 2012 but newly edited by Criterion. She provides a more personal angle on Stanley Kubrick’s interest in Traumnovelle—against her own preferences, since she hated the story. But the more she objected the more that he got interested in the story (although she did succeed in steering him toward A Clockwork Orange instead). She’s softened on the book since then, especially in light of how the film turned out.
Continuing in the archival vein, Criterion has included Stanley Kubrick’s Director’s Guild of America Speech after receiving their D.W. Griffith award in 1998. It was prerecorded on the set of Eyes Wide Shut. (The clip is preceded by a brief introduction by Jack Nicholson.) Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Jan Harlan is footage from a press conference that was held in Paris in 1999. It’s mostly the two actors fielding questions about working with Kubrick and making Eyes Wide Shut, but Harlan chimes in occasionally to provide his thoughts about the film’s story.
Never Just a Dream: Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut is a 2019 short subject directed by Matthew Wells, featuring interviews with Harlan, Katharina Kubrick, Warner Bros. executive Julian Senior, and Kubrick’s assistant Anthony Frewin. While it does briefly address Kubrick’s lengthy attempt to bring the novel to the screen, it’s mostly focused on getting the film across the finish line and how Kubrick’s death impacted everyone involved.
Lost Kubrick: The Unfinished Films of Stanley Kubrick is a 2007 featurette about the director’s unrealized projects, or at least two of them, anyway: Napoleon and The Aryan Papers. Narrated by Malcolm McDowell, it includes interviews with Harlan, Frewin, Jack Nicholson, Joseph Mazzello, choreographer Daniel Richter, makeup artist Barbara Daley, production designer Roy Walker, and Warner Bros. executive John Calley, plus authors John Baxtger, Paul Duncan, Stuart McDougal, and Louis Begley. While there’s much more to be said on the subject of Kubrick’s unproduced films, it’s still nice to hear about it directly from those who were involved.
The centerpiece of all the extras is Kubrick Remembered, a feature-length 2014 documentary that was directed by Gary Khammar for the Warner Bros. Stanley Kubrick: the Masterpiece Collection boxed set. The title is accurate, because it’s not so much a portrait of the filmmaker and his films as it is of the man himself. While it contains plenty of biographical details, it’s less concerned with chronology than it is with using those details to illuminate his personality, including his sense of humor. Even his films are covered in a way that demonstrates how his working methodologies reveal the kind of person that he was. Kubrick Remembered features a treasure trove of interviews with Kubrick’s friends, family, and associates, including: Christiane Kubrick, Katharina Kubrick, Jan Harlan, Manuel Harlan, Leon Vitali, Anthony Frewin, Larry Smith, Milena Canonero, Steven Spielberg, James B. Harris, Phillip Castle, Todd Field, Leelee Sobieski, Malcolm McDowell, Keir Dullea, Matthew Modine, Vincent D’Onofrio, R. Lee Ermey, Ryan O’Neal, Gay Hamilton, Dominic Savage, and Thomas Gibson, plus Warner Bros. executives Eric Senat and Mike Kaplan.
Last, but certainly not least, there’s a collection of Trailers and TV Spots, which is significant because it finally includes the uncut ShoWest Convention Trailer that Kubrick created for their 1999 Convention, which was the first time that any footage from the film had been screened for the public. It’s a full-length version of the mirror scene set to Chris Isaak’s Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing, minus the jump cut and the early fadeout as it appears in the final film.
It’s a fine slate of extras, but there are a few things missing here from the previous Blu-rays and DVDs. The Channel Four documentary The Last Movie: Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut has been left off in favor of Never Just a Dream: Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut, and the interviews with Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Steven Spielberg have also been omitted. So while you’ll probably never want to watch that tired old HD master of Eyes Wide Shut again, you may want to hang onto your Blu-ray for the missing extras alone. Regardless, Criterion’s UHD set is an across-the-board upgrade, and a dramatic one, too. Vastly improved picture quality, moderately improved audio quality, and a better set of extras that resurrects Kubrick Remembered from the Masterpiece Collection set. What’s not to love? Maybe Eyes Wide Shut itself? If that’s how you feel, then maybe it’s time to take another look. Like most Stanley Kubrick films, it has benefitted greatly from the passage of time and it definitely benefits from repeat viewings. And there’s no better way to watch it now that via Criterion’s 4K.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).