Stanley Kubrick’s final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, came out in 1999, but the director obtained filming rights for its source material as early as the 1960s. Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella, Dream Story, inspired Kubrick’s film, which centers on a married couple (played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman) whose relationship fractures after they open up about their erotic fantasies. Schnitzler’s novella makes good use of its early-20th-century setting: Its publication coincided with Europe’s turn-of-the-century Decadent movement, which prized human fantasy and artistic hedonism. Kubrick transposed the novella’s Vienna setting to 1990s New York City, and that alone recontextualized the movie’s central relationship. But Eyes Wide Shut — now streaming on Tubi — also enriched the themes of Schnitzler’s novella in unprecedented ways.
While Eyes Wide Shut was Kubrick’s highest-grossing film at the box office, its audience reception was abysmal at the time: a baffling D- on CinemaScore. Several factors could be responsible: Kubrick’s unexpected death, six days after he privately screened a supposed final cut of the film, fueled rumors about its actual state of completion, while also raising questions about the record-breaking production shoot, which lasted 400 days. Also, Warner Bros. made the unfortunate decision to market the film exclusively as an erotic thriller, banking on the popularity of leads Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who were married at the time. While Eyes Wide Shut is provocative, Kubrick’s interpretation unravels like a paranoid fever dream, rejecting traditional narrative structures in favor of an anxiety-inducing humiliation ritual that Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise) experiences overnight.
In Dream Story, married couple Fridolin and Albertina exchange sexual fantasies while acknowledging the erotic temptations they’ve faced since their wedding. Fridolin is especially disturbed by this…