Eyes Wide Shut: Special Edition (BD) [Blu-ray]

Many reviewers have made comments on the script, soundtrack, artistic direction, and acting in Eyes Wide Shut. All are superb, especially the interior photography, but I would rather focus on the profound story-telling in this exceptional film. The plot of Eyes Wide Shut weaves together the path of man's fall from Grace, his struggle and journey to regain that state, and the amazing almost accidental way that Grace is restored to the human spirit. Tom Cruise plays Dr. Tom, the Everyman. Nicole Kidman plays Allison, his wife. In the beginning of the film she plays the Eve archtype, who stimulates the fall from Grace with a curious note of discord and jealousy. Tom, the Adam/Everyman character, has it all in his Garden of Eden. He has a wonderful medical practice near Central Park. His beautiful wife, who is shown in total naked innocense in the first scene of the film, manages an art gallery in SoHo. They have a multimillion dollar apartment overlooking the Park. They have a bright and lovely young daughter that loves them. They have a beautiful and to all appearances perfect life. They attend a Holiday Party at the home of an ultra-rich, ultra-powerful patient of Dr. Tom. While separated, the Devil (disquised as a suave sophisticated older man) asks Nicole to dance and within minutes begins to seduce her and try to get her to go upstairs and have sex with him. The actor who plays this Devil character was perfect. He was slim with a big head full of white hair. He wraps himself around Nicole Kidman like a slinky boa constrictor. She avoids the seduction despite being slightly intoxicated. Yet she does not escape unharmed for he has planted the seed of discord in her mind. She performed well and she would like to be praised for resisting this seduction, but she realizes her husband will never know. Dr. Tom in the meanwhile is tending to the herion overdose of a very high priced prostitute. Laying nude and unconscious, this woman appears to be the apex of earthly beauty. Dr. Tom revives her and treats her with extreme kindness and dignity and handles the entire situation very diplomatically. Again, in mirror image to his wife, he has performed beautifully yet he can't really tell his wife what he has experienced. They both leave the party with secrets they can not share. After smoking a join at home, Allison challenges her husband that he really does not understand the sexual desires of women and he really doesn't know her thoughts and secrets. The Devil has done his work! Adam is about to be handed the apple! Allison admits that she had a consuming overwhelming sexual fantasy while the family was on Cape Cod based on a military officer she saw eating dinner in a restaurant. Dr. Tom's fall begins here and boy does he fall! He journeys through the night-life of Manhattan but eventually gets caught up in the nest of Devils in their sexual orgy hideaway. His life is in danger and yet a beautiful prostitute saves him and he is allowed to leave. Later he finds that she has died of an overdose. Remember that a sacrifice is required when one falls from Grace, a maxim of every religion. In some ways his journey is like Ullyses trying to make his way home to the waiting Penelope. This is especailly true with the wild encounters he has with Manhattan low-life on his night's journey. He is almost seduced by a street walker who he finds out later has AIDS. He makes his way back to his wife, full of contradictions and uncertainties, but resolved to rejoin with her - to renew the emotional bonds that he lost during his night of journey into dark places. The film ends in a gigantic toy store, a place of renewed innocence, and when Dr. Tom asks Allison where to they go from here, she acknowledges that they move forward together for they were "lucky". It is this word "lucky" that resolves the story from a theological point of view, for they have been saved by the Grace of God. They don't deserve this gift,they really didn't ask for it, they just struggled in the dark like all human beings. Yet, in the end they are the recipients of this Grace. Stanley Kubrick based this film on Arthur Schnitzler's short novel "Traumnovelle", but surely Schnitzler based his novel on the eternal story of Adam and Eve, the fall and the redemption. This film that was judged obscene turns out to be sacred.

Honestly one of my new favorite movies (I’m late, I know). I have been a fan of The Shining for years but have recently decided to watch some of Kubrick’s other work and my goodness has it only solidified his genius status in my mind. This movie is probably about as up my alley as a movie can be. I love the mysterious, off-putting themes and scenes in this film along with the crazy reveals along the way. If you have not watched it yet, I envy you for having the chance to see this film for the first time.

Actually purchased the Criterion 4K version of this movie the worst 4K I have ever viewed and returned it then read a lot of reviews and so purchased this one. Color is good clarity good quality as well looks like a Bluray worth viewing. Best I believe of this particular movie out there. Others also that are throw away quality can’t even watch unless really desperate in the trash so to speak. I have the new 2026 77 inch LG classic 4G Series that makes everything unbelievable. I purchased 2 of them for different rooms I view inn. The 4K / Bluray player is the Sony UPB-X700M Ultra HD Player. By far the best low priced player ever released that is equal to the monitor everything played through it. Dennon theater sound system where I purchased individual good quality Sony speakers just enough not too much. If you like this movie as a collectible I suggest getting it while they are still available. If Criterion making a 4k could not fix it up i doubt anyone else will. Hope this help you.

This last Stanley Kubrick film, Eyes Wide Shut, is very well done with fine performances by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidmann, but this film is not for everyone, and it should be for mature audiences only. To be perfectly frank, this film has whole lot of things in it to keep your eyes wide open, and I think most people would agree with that. The movie was, however, a little unfair for Nicole Kidmann. She was ravishing and exceptional in the film, and what do we get to see with Tom -- not a whole lot. Heterosexual men who are fans of Nicole Kidmann will love this film. I was a little confused as to which woman was it who was warning him at the elite sex club. Was it the prostitute who Dr. Bill treated at the party early on in the film or was it the prostitute who he met on the street? And what was up with all of those people in the room at the private residence/sex club who was just hanging out? They went there just to scare the hell out of Tom's character who went there on the spare of the moment. And the costume store, do owners of costume stores live in the same building and would rent the daughter, I think, for sex. These were all strange things that were perfect in a strange, Stanley Kubrick film about sex but for reality I am not so sure. And the other oddity about the film, which is common in most of Kubrick films, is the reality of the plot. Perhaps I am a little naive, but would important and well known people congregate at a private residence in a large group to experience sex and yet wear masks? That was just rubbed me wrong, so to speak. I don't think I could ... oops, scratch that. If Alan Cumming had a larger part and more interaction with Tom in the film, I'd give it five stars. but it was fun to watch nonetheless.

The first time I saw EWS was with my cousin, a few days after it had opened in theaters in Washington DC. I had read all the production hype, and took it with a grain of salt. Being a Kubrick fan and studying his work since the 1970’s, I was confident he would not make a film as superficial as the ads indicated. Seeing a Kubrick film for the first time, has always been a very special thing for me, and my first reactions are always the same; elation, awe, confusion and curiosity. I always walk away from the experience deeply moved by the sheer power of Kubrick’s imagery and style. EWS was no exception, but in a way, I felt disappointment because I could only see the surface of a film that appeared to be about the love lives of a rich couple. Who cares! How can this film be so trite? Yet, at the same time, I was bothered by the fact that there was something lurking under that surface façade, something profound, and I felt compelled to dig deeper. It wasn’t until the release of the DVD, and viewing it several times, did I start to discover how complex this film really is. In the first scene, we are hearing music, which we assume, is the sound track. But then Dr. Bill switches off the stereo. This is the first clue Kubrick gives us that we are about to be tricked and deceived, and that what we are about to see, is not what we think it is. In fact, the surface story of Bill and Alice’s petty lives and marital problems is a façade, it’s not what the film is about at all. Kubrick is throwing us a red herring. Every scene in this film has its own story arc, and resonates with a mysterious immediacy, real, at the same time, unreal, ‘hyperreal’! Much of the story, and its true meaning, are visual, the dialog merely giving us clues where to look. The film is not about sex, or even about infidelity, it’s about wealth, power, corruption at its core, and class distinction. Kubrick takes us into the forbidden underbelly of the ultra-rich and their immoral, controlling social order which infects the lower classes like a cancer. Kubrick’s last film is very complex, powerful and terrifying. I believe it’s a masterpiece which will one day be considered one of the best films ever made.

This was definitely not my favorite Kubrick film. Interesting visuals but dialogue was kind of dingy at times. I know it's a lauded film but I wouldn't feel compelled to see it again.

Stanley Kubrick spent the last years of his life working on this film. And by the time Eyes Wide Shut went into general release in the United States, the director was already deceased, giving his final project the cachet of a farewell gesture-or perhaps a Last Judgment, since the Dies Irae from the Mozart Requiem can be heard at one point on the soundtrack. Yet its long awaited appearance turned out to be something of an anticlimax when most of the pre-release gossip turned out to be unjustified. No dazzling spectacle in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey nor even A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut (made available here as part of Warner Home Video's excellent set of Kubrick's films) was first of all a fable for the approaching millennium, directed with a breathtaking désinvolture that still seems astonishing several years later. One day, I hope, Eyes Wide Shut will be recognized as one of the most beautiful works in the history of the cinema. Only in bad works of art or the artifacts of pop culture is it possible to make a facile distinction between the periphery of a work and its core. In an imaginative creation like Kubrick's last film, the limits of the core extend to its furthermost boundaries just as what could at first glance seem peripheral penetrates to its innermost recesses. Already, the opening shots of the Harfords in their stylish apartment getting ready to go out for a soiree go far beyond simply establishing a setting. The least that could be said about these powerfully iridescent, Ophulsian compositions set to music by Shostakovitch is how much more than functional they are: rather than simply establishing a particular locale, they serve to introduce us to a perversely enchanted world. The mise en scène is incantatory, but the spirits it is calling up are those of high-tech consumerism. In these images, the décor glows with a maleficent radiance, making of the Harfords themselves little more than the props of their own property. Small wonder that such a culture finds the culmination of its most refined pleasures in the celebration of a Black Mass at a mansion on Long Island--movie trivia buffs will not fail to notice a visual allusion to Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest--attended by the crème de la crème of the rich, famous, and powerful, a ritual which blasphemously travesties the Christmas festivities taking place at the same moment and which has striking parallels to the events of de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom in both its literary version and its much later screen adaptation by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò o le 120 giornati di Sodoma (1975). In the milieu in which the Harfords move, reified to the last degree, success is all a matter of remaining on the surface of things, and Bill Harford has thoroughly mastered that skill. But the surface begins to crack open one evening when his wife relates a fantasy about sleeping with a Naval officer they had briefly glimpsed at a resort. Bill reacts violently to this confession, insisting that he has never had similar fantasies of his own. But he cannot exorcise the images she has planted in his mind and they soon begin to take shape on the screen. Moreover, this fantasy which increasingly obsesses Harford opens up to a larger world of collective desires underlying the beautiful realm of surfaces in which Bill wishes to remain happily imprisoned. Forced to confront that underworld by series of encounters involving the daughter of a patient, a prostitute, and ultimately a Satanist coven, he can only reject it as a mystery. The phrase "eyes wide shut" is virtually an etymological gloss on the word "mystery." In the words of Carl Kerényi (in his essay "The Mysteries of the Kabeiroi"), "The source of the term 'Mysteria'--as also of 'mystes' and 'mystikos'--consists in a verb whose ritual significance is 'to initiate' (µυeΐν), developed from the verb µύeιν, 'to close the eyes or mouth.'" He goes on to add, "the Mysteria begin for the mystes when, as sufferer of the event (µυούµeνος), he closes his eyes, falls back as it were into his own darkness, enters into the darkness." And is there anything less enigmatic about an audience sitting in a darkened theater, an audience which also could be said to fall back as it were into its own darkness, to enter its darkness--to borrow Kerenyi's formulation--watching this spectacle being enacted on screen? It is Bill's friend, the musician Nick Nightingale who tells him of playing at an event whose specifics are unclear to him, since he has to play blindfolded. Nevertheless, the few details he has been able to spy upon after the blindfold slightly fell from his eyes the last time he performed rouse Bill's interest, and he demands to go along to the event. When Harford, the non-initiate, violates this mystery, he not only disrupts its performance, but commits a crime which can only be atoned for by a human sacrifice--that of the young woman whom Harford has previously rescued from a drug overdose at the fancy party the evening before. Yet there is little mystery about this mystery, which continues in a perhaps more explicit vein the theme of archaic regression that recurs throughout Kubrick's work--perhaps most arrestingly in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which modern technology is presented as an outgrowth of the anthropoids' fetishization of the black obelisk which has descended to them from the heavens like the stone given by Gabriel to Abraham enshrined in the Kaaba. Civilization is constantly haunted by the specter of the barbaric past it has never been able to overcome, and the cult in Eyes Wide Shut is only a final incarnation of this key motif which Kubrick employed here for last time. After that death had the final word: Acta est fabula!

A Blu-ray disc of this extreme poor quality is a shame. The resolution is worse than that of a vhs tape. Right from the very beginning of the film, Tom Cruise’s face is totally blurred with extensive digitization.

not pictures of Kidman with Cruise on the cover

Good

The language of the subtitles, described on the description on the amazon website, and the language of the real subtitle of the DVD are not the same...

The Blu-ray from 2007 didn't really look that great back then and Warner annoyingly insisted on 1.85:1 aspect ratios being 1.78:1 (there is a noticeable difference). Finally after all these years we have a new 4k scan and the film in it's theatrical aspect ratio. There's plenty of grain and looks sharper than the previous release. It won't blow you away but watch a scene in 4k and then switch to the 2007 Blu-ray (which is also included and contains the bonus features) and you may notice the upgrade. The audio is 5.1 DTS HD MA which was Multichannel PCM on the previous release and there's not really any difference (best Google for a detailed explanation on audio formats). It's hard to recommend this to anyone unless they are a) a big Kubrick fan b) Steel book collector and c) purists who prefer their films in the original theatrical aspect ratio. The U.S Criterion Collection edition features new bonus material while this one doesn't.

Muy buena película. Muy buena. Trata de asuntos misteriosos de las sociedades. Interesante película. Para la colección.