So I’ve always been a huge Kubrick fan. Like, literally always — when I was a kid, 2001 was the single movie that was recognizably better-than-average to me, and Stanley Kubrick was therefore the only director whose name I knew as an imposing magisterial figure.

So when this came out back in my college days, I brushed off the negative reviews and went to see it anyway. Of course, this was a quarter century ago, and so I’ve forgotten a lot of what I thought then, but what I remembered was:

  1. that there was a lot of nudity, 2) that most of it took place in a single surreal night, and 3) that it was better than the negative reviews would have had it.

In the intervening quarter century, the movie’s had a critical re-appraisal of sorts — it’s still not held up as Kubrick’s best, but I think there’s a general sense that it’s a legitimately good movie that was unfairly maligned on release. And so when it popped up on the Criterion Channel, I definitely wanted to watch it and see what I thought about it from my perspective these days.

To put the conclusion upfront, I stand by my ancient take that it was better than the contemporary bad reviews; but I’m not fully on board with the modern re-appraisal of it as Actually Great. I think it’s an interesting, but deeply flawed, movie that still ranks in the lower tier of Kubrick movies.

So my wife summed the movie up pithily as “you got your giallo in my Noah Baumbach movie” and dang if that doesn’t just capture it. Because, yeah, this is one part a relationship movie about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s rocky marriage; and one part this not-quite-supernatural night-time investigation of a mysterious sex cult that’s left a dead woman and a trail of threatening actions behind them.

The giallo-esque part of it works pretty well. This is mostly the “single surreal night” that I remembered from back when (though it turns out to actually be two nights, one of which is 60% more surreal than the other). You’ve got the sex party with all the ceremony and dramatic robes and masks, you’ve got a costume shop owner who’s prostituting his underage daughter (who I really thought was Helen Hunt, except I couldn’t make the age work; turns out it’s Leelee Sobieski); you’ve got a grieving daughter who hits on Tom Cruise and a prostitute and a piano player and a visit to the morgue and a guy who’s ominously following Tom Cruise and… seriously, I could easily be describing an Argento movie, right? It’s New York instead of Rome or whatever, but there’s not too much distance here. It’s all heightened and intense and kinda nonsensical and vibesy.

(As an aside, back in the day, they had to censor the sex party pretty heavily to get an R rating. But of course in 2025, nobody cares what anything is rated, streaming doesn’t have any rules. So Criterion shows the unedited version, which is tbh still pretty mild compared to a lot of giallo.)

But then the other half of the movie is the relationship between Cruise and Kidman, and this part works much less well. The fundamental problem, I think, is that it’s seemingly meant to be in a mundane, realistic register — like, they’re getting a babysitter for their kid, or having a tense conversation over Christmas shopping or whatever else — but nothing in their conversation feels at all realistic. It’s all psychosexual melodrama, but a very old-fashionedy kind. Like, even in the ’90s, people weren’t this weird and repressed about sex in relationships.

The movie is based on a 1926 book, Traumnovelle. I don’t quite think that Kubrick should have filmed the movie as an explicit period piece — it being set in the present-day ’90s seems important for it — but I think that adapting this element of it needed some modernization. Like, “my wife has felt sexual desire in the past, and sometimes has horny dreams” was probably something that would have shocked a husband at some point in history, but I don’t think the late ’90s was that point.

I think this may be an area where the passage of time helps the movie, though. Because at this point, the movie is just fundamentally old, and many of the people who might see it nowadays have no firsthand memory of the ’90s — so if you’re just like “sure, it was the twencen, people were all repressed in the twencen,” I guess it will seem plausible enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of its critical reclamation is simply younger people who aren’t bothered by the anachronistic characterizations.