Just prior to the new millennium, Kubrick closed out his one-of-a-kind career with this open-ended adaptation of Traumnovelle, a relatively obscure Austrian novella by Arthur Schnitzler whose psychosexual misadventures Kubrick cleverly relocates from early 20th century Vienna to contemporary New York City. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play Bill and Alice Harford, married Manhattanites who experience a Yuletide marital crisis after Alice’s admission of an adulterous dream propels Bill to his own dark night of the soul. Bringing philosophical weight to the then-in-vogue erotic thriller genre, Eyes Wide Shut plumbs Bill’s repressed id in a series of confrontations with New York’s power-hungry and sexually mischievous underworld, reconstructed from Kubrick’s London studio as a neon-lit dreamscape. The film grows increasingly conspiratorial in tone with each new challenge to Bill’s controlled universe, climaxing in an extended sequence at a masked ball that represents an apotheosis of Kubrick’s career-long fixation on the uneasy relationship between mind and flesh.