The Eyes Wide Shut Conspiracy |
When Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was released in the summer of 1999, the world shrugged. Critics didn’t know what to do with it, treating it less like the final statement of a master filmmaker and more like a bootlegged work print — understandable, given that Kubrick, who typically fussed over his movies until the last possible second, had died that March, just days after delivering a semi-finished cut to Warner Bros. The studio and his estate made the remaining tweaks. Meanwhile, audiences had been primed by the marketing to expect an explicit, boundary-pushing erotic thriller featuring an extended orgy sequence that almost triggered an NC-17 rating. What they got instead was much tamer: a slow-motion marital drama about a Manhattan doctor (Tom Cruise), rattled by his wife’s (Nicole Kidman) confession of an adulterous fantasy, who drifts through a series of lustful but unconsummated encounters before crashing a masked sex party thrown by an elite secret society in a Long Island mansion. The film’s dreamlike atmosphere veered toward the surreal, with Cruise and Kidman doing the weirdest acting of their lives and the orgygoers’ portrayal — the masks, the password, the choreography — striking many viewers as more goofy than sexy or sinister.
But Kubrick’s movies have a habit of aging into new meanings, like monoliths that take time for us apes to figure out, and Eyes Wide Shut eventually came to be seen in a different light. Beyond the orgy, there are subtler, more disturbing moments — including a scene in which a costume-shop owner appears to offer his underage daughter to Cruise’s character — that hint at a world where sex, power, and predation blur. With hindsight, those undertones seemed to foreshadow real-world horrors to come. In the 2010s, Pizzagate and QAnon dragged rumors of elite sex-trafficking rings from the fringes into the mainstream of American paranoia. Then came Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest and death, and suddenly an underappreciated film from two decades earlier started to look like an uncanny premonition.
After a while, some began to wonder if perhaps Eyes Wide Shut hadn’t been a little too prescient. Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist who spent years on each of his films and demanded dozens, sometimes hundreds, of takes per scene. So, the thinking went, every costume, prop, and line reading is there for a reason, infinite symbolism scattered across the frame for anyone determined enough to decipher it. This was the logic that led some to believe that he’d helped NASA fake the moon landing and then confessed to it by putting Danny Torrance in an Apollo 11 sweater in The Shining. That idea, along with a handful of even farther-fetched ones, was presented without comment in Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary, Room 237, a film presumably meant to mock such readings that may have only encouraged them. And Kubrick didn’t exactly tamp down the mythmaking. In the final years of his life, he rarely left his estate north of London and all but stopped giving interviews, allowing his work to speak for itself — and, in the absence of explanation, to be interpreted however anyone pleased. So when Eyes Wide Shut seemed to anticipate a scandal that wouldn’t come fully into view until decades later, it raised a question: What if Kubrick knew?
Soon, in exactly the parts of the internet you’d expect, a conspiracy theory took shape: Kubrick had made Eyes Wide Shut as a warning, an exposé of an actual pedophile cult hiding in plain sight among the global elite. The masked orgy wasn’t just a metaphor — for the sexual hypocrisies of the upper class, or the transactional nature of intimacy, or the secret compromises of monogamy, or whatever — it was a re-enactment of what really happened behind mansion doors. And once the wrong people caught wind of it, they had Kubrick killed so that the movie could be reedited to scrub the most incriminating details. Some claim an entire 24 minutes were cut. And yet, the theory goes, Kubrick had so masterfully embedded his clues in the film that some of them survived the posthumous meddling.
There are multiple strains of this theory, each with its own twist on which real cabal Kubrick was supposedly exposing. Some point to the usual suspects — the Illuminati, Bohemian Grove, garden-variety Satanists. Others zoom in on the Rothschild family, noting that it once owned the 19th-century mansion used for some of the movie’s orgy exteriors. Others go a few steps further, claiming that Eyes Wide Shut was not just predictive of Epstein’s crimes; it was literally about him. (The evidence? Well, for starters, in a party scene near the beginning of the movie, a couple idling behind Kidman is said to look like Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, or at least the man has gray hair.)
Across these variants, one detail is usually cited as the smoking gun. In the movie’s last scene, Bill and Alice Harford (Cruise and Kidman) are walking through a toy store with their young daughter, Helena (Madison Eginton). Just before credits roll, Helena is shown standing near two adult male extras — who, believers claim, also appear at the party that opens the film — and then following them as they head toward another aisle. This half-second beat, according to breathless video essays and blog posts stitched together from freeze-frames, is Kubrick’s final, chilling reveal: The Harfords have handed their daughter over to the cult.
This theory has become surprisingly popular. Versions of it circulate constantly on Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok, where today Kubrick may be remembered less as a filmmaker than as a whistleblower who died for telling the truth about high-society pedophiles. And if it once lived mainly in the sewers of social media, it broke into the daylight in December of last year, when Roger Avary, the co-writer of Pulp Fiction and the director of The Rules of Attraction, laid out his own variation of the conspiracy on The Joe Rogan Experience.
On the podcast, Avary told Rogan that........