Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, continues to cast a long shadow over cinema and internet culture alike. Since its 1999 release, the film has inspired fervent debate, scholarly analysis, and, more recently, a surge of conspiracy theories linking its mysterious narrative to real-world scandals involving the world’s elite. With the recent release of Jeffrey Epstein’s government files, these theories have resurfaced with fresh intensity—yet, as a close examination of both the film and the facts reveals, the truth is far less sensational than the internet’s fevered imagination would have us believe.
Set against the twinkling backdrop of Christmas in Manhattan, Eyes Wide Shut follows Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) as their marriage unravels after Alice confesses to a powerful, unfulfilled desire for another man. This revelation sends Bill on a surreal odyssey through New York’s underbelly, where he encounters a grieving daughter, a prostitute, and, most notably, a masked gathering orchestrated by a secretive elite society. The infamous orgy scene—haunting, ritualistic, and dripping with menace—has become the film’s most enduring image, fueling speculation about what Kubrick was really trying to say about power, sex, and society.
But what is Eyes Wide Shut actually about? As The Washington Post and other outlets have pointed out, Kubrick’s film is not an exposé of real-life depravity but an allegory about class, jealousy, and humiliation. The masked ritual, far from being a documentary insert, is “Kubrick doing what he always did: using spectacle to show how power behaves when it is unaccountable,” as one recent analysis put it. The horror of the scene comes not from explicit violence or criminality, but from “the calmness of authority, the politeness of menace, the certainty that rules exist you will never be allowed to read.”
Yet, in the internet age, implication often replaces evidence. A viral thread on X (formerly Twitter) recently reignited the myth that Kubrick was assassinated for exposing the predations of the world’s elite—a theory that has gained traction in the wake of the Epstein scandal. The theory’s architecture is simple: Kubrick died of a heart attack on March 7, 1999, just days after screening the final cut of Eyes Wide Shut for the studio. The proximity of his death to the film’s completion is cited as suspicious; rumors swirl that Warner Bros. excised scenes exposing “elite sexual rituals, child sacrifice, and organized depravity.” Yet, as multiple sources confirm, there is no script, footage, or paper trail to support these claims—just a mood, passed around as certainty.
According to The Washington Post, the production of Eyes Wide Shut was extensively documented, and Kubrick’s declining health was well known. “Kubrick was understood to be in poor health and died for that reason,” the paper reports, flatly dismissing the notion of foul play. The supposed existence of 24 minutes of deleted footage “naming names” is pure fantasy; no such scenes have ever surfaced, nor would they have made narrative sense in the context of the film. As one critic wryly observes, “if ‘they’ murdered Stanley Kubrick to block the truth about Eyes Wide Shut, why in the world did ‘they’ allow the film to come out, without incident, just a few months later?”
The recent release of Epstein’s files has only muddied the waters. While the documents have embarrassed many and ended some careers, they have “all but disproved several” of the wilder conspiracy theories, according to The Washington Post. The files do not “vindicate” claims about Hollywood being a hotbed of elite abuse; in fact, Hollywood figures are “fairly underrepresented among Epstein associates, at least compared to other sectors of the American elite (academia, media, politics, the British royal family, etc.).” The overlap between Eyes Wide Shut and Epstein’s crimes is, as one essay notes, “emotional, not evidentiary.” The film was adapted from a 1926 novella—decades before Epstein’s crimes came to light.
So why does the Kubrick–Epstein myth refuse to die? Part of the answer lies in the film’s own ambiguity. Kubrick was famously secretive and meticulous, and Eyes Wide Shut “denies closure.” It ends, not with revelation, but with discomfort. After confronting the masked society, Bill returns home to find his own mask placed on his pillow—a chilling symbol of the collision between his secret and domestic lives. In the film’s final scene, Bill and Alice discuss their ordeal in a crowded toy store, with Alice delivering the blunt, unforgettable line: “Fuck.” This word, loaded with meaning, has been interpreted as everything from a desperate plea for reconnection to a grounding rejection of fantasy.
But the film’s true power lies not in hidden confessions or secret codes, but in its exploration of “the humiliation of learning that privilege has limits, and that beyond those limits lie rooms you are not meant to enter, even if the door briefly opens.” Kubrick was less interested in naming villains than in exposing systems—how access, compliance, and silence perpetuate power. In both the film and the Epstein saga, the mechanisms of secrecy and hierarchy are disturbingly similar, but the parallels remain “broad enough to be universal.”
Conspiracy culture thrives on ellipses. A pause becomes proof. A maybe becomes a manifesto. A resurfaced podcast clip featuring Eyes Wide Shut co-writer Roger Avary on The Joe Rogan Experience has fueled speculation about post-production changes after Kubrick’s death. But as the source points out, it is unremarkable for films to be finished in this way; Avary does not claim that scenes depicting child sacrifice or elite pedophile rings were removed. Those details are supplied later by audiences eager for a grand narrative.
In the end, the facts are plain: Stanley Kubrick died of a heart attack at age 70, days after completing his final film. Eyes Wide Shut remains a haunting meditation on desire, power, and the masks we wear—not a coded confession or a whistleblower’s last testament. The internet may prefer a more cinematic story, but the reality is complicated, ambiguous, and all too human. Kubrick’s film endures, not because it exposes a secret, but because it asks us to confront the uncomfortable truths lurking beneath the surface of everyday life.
For all its intrigue and ambiguity, Eyes Wide Shut ultimately reminds us that the most unsettling mysteries are often those that remain unsolved, lingering in the shadows between fact and fantasy.