Gen Z are obsessed with Eyes Wide Shut – and it’s got a lot to do with Jeffrey Epstein

Starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, the film was derided by critics and audiences over 25 years ago. So, why are a new generation obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s swansong and the hidden messages they believe it contains? Chloe Combi reports

Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise play a married couple in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (Warner Bros)

When Eyes Wide Shut was released in 1999, the reception was cool at best. Despite it being the swansong of the legendary film director Stanley Kubrick, who died six days after presenting Warner Bros with the final cut, audiences and critics were puzzled by the chilly and glacially paced exploration of the relationship between Dr Bill Harford and his wife, Alice, played respectively by the then-married couple, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

More to the point, the depiction of the curiously chemistry-free real-life and on-screen married couple getting stoned, and getting it on, gave people more ick than oooh. By that point, Tom Cruise was long past his dreamy 1980s pinup poster boy and it was a bit like watching your tries-too-hard-to-be-liked uncle attend an orgy and seduce your frosty but impeccably dressed aunt.

‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is a blueprint and explainer of just about every conspiracy theory that you have ever heard about (Warner Bros)

But 26 years on from the film’s release, Eyes Wide Shut has enjoyed something of a reappraisal and is fast becoming a firm cult favourite of Generation Z, to the point that the masks and cloaks worn in the film are some of the most in-demand costumes this Halloween.

Many believe this resurgence is because this conspiracy-loving generation is linking the film to some of the biggest scandals we have seen in recent times. Whether it's in lengthy social media posts and or deep-dive podcasts, Gen Z (and many others) have come to believe Eyes Wide Shut is a blueprint and explainer of just about every conspiracy theory that you have ever heard about.

Sydney Pollack portrays Victor Ziegler, a rich man with a central role in a shadowy network of people (Warner Bros)

The unfurling horror of Jeffrey Epstein and his just-coming-into-focus sprawling network of sex trafficking young girls for rich and powerful men has only electrified this interest. The parallels drawn between Eyes Wide Shut and Epstein are obvious, according to internet sleuths, who see the film as some kind of blueprint for his abhorrent behaviour.

In the film, actor Sydney Pollack plays Victor Ziegler and has undeniable things in common with Epstein; his physical appearance and mannerisms, his mysterious and unexplained wealth, and his central role in the masked orgy attended by (as the character tells Tom Cruise’s Harford and the audience) people so powerful “if I told you their names, you wouldn’t sleep so well at night”.

I recently watched Eyes Wide Shut with some twentysomething Gen Zs and I was astonished by the depth of their textual reading of the film, both as a piece of art and in relation to the Epstein case. These are typical Gen Zs – not huge readers, but big consumers of TikTok – and their ability to interpret the film as an explainer of Epstein through a rich reading of Greek mythology, opera, art, and controversial figures that both preceded and coincided Epstein, including Vladimir Nabokov, Woody Allen, Arthur C Clarke, members of our own royal family and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. And it quickly gets even stranger.

Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is adapted from ‘Dream Story’, a 1926 Austrian novella by Arthur Schnitzler (Penguin Classics)

Many Gen Zs believe that at the end of the film, Kubrick clearly signals Alice and Bill’s daughter, Helena, does not, in fact, go to another part of the toy shop, but is kidnapped by some shadowy men who were at Ziegler’s Christmas party. This is not a niche theory, but a widely held one, with modern Gen Z audiences now bizarrely connecting this to the 2007 kidnapping of Madeleine McCann, who wasn’t even born in 1999.

The irresistible timing of Stanley Kubrick’s death, who Gen Z believe was bumped off for “telling too many secrets of the elites” in his last film – was also another parallel with Epstein’s demise, with millions not believing he died by suicide in prison and insisting more nefarious forces were at play.

So, why are Gen Z, a generation who were small children (or not even born) when Epstein began to worm his way into power and indeed, Eyes Wide Shut was released, so fascinated and invested in both the real-life case and the film?

A curiously chemistry-free Cruise and Kidman (Warner Bros)

One of the reasons that fairytales were written originally was both to instruct and scare children, and the messages worked as both stories and lessons. In fairytales, the children and young adults who misbehaved and disobeyed the parental figures were usually spectacularly punished until they were rescued from their peril by a figure of authority – the prince, the huntsman, the fairy godmother, etc. Eyes Wide Shut has an undeniable fairytale-like quality that appeals to modern, young audiences, but fairytales also have a lot in common with conspiracies, too: they are a simple story that, when you scratch beneath the surface, signal a darker, hidden truth about human nature.

In deeply fractured, uncertain times where power and wealth distribution are anything but equal, conspiracies are becoming dangerously comforting and empowering, particularly for younger generations who often feel utterly disenfranchised in a chaotic world. People who believe them tend to get a sense that they aren’t being fooled by powerful people wanting to conceal inconvenient truths from them, and this also affords them a collective ability to hold truth to power, which Gen Z are deeply committed to.

Cruise’s Dr Bill Harford is pulled into a seedy world dominated by powerful people (Warner Bros)

And there is some substance to this. People’s obsessive interest in the Epstein case has actually prevented it from being swept under the carpet by some powerful people who would clearly much prefer the whole saga would be shut.

With many Halloween costumes becoming more controversial due to worries about cultural appropriation and insensitivities, the Eyes Wide Shut choice is a cool one for Gen Z, signalling they are in the know and their eyes are open to the “truth”. Even if all the conspiracies are complete nonsense, it is making the world seem a little less scary to some young people, who are feeling more powerful for it.

And if you’re not sure what this means, maybe rewatch Eyes Wide Shut and hunt for the hidden meanings yourself.