Epstein conspiracy theorists are rewatching Eyes Wide Shut – this is why

A scene from Eyes Wide Shut showing the film’s infamous masked orgy sequence, now central to conspiracy claims. Photo / Alamy

Moments after Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) witnesses a surreal display of masked orgies at a party in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut, the mysterious Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) tells him: “Those were not just some ordinary people. If I told you their names... no, I’m not going to tell you their names... but if I did, I don’t think you’d sleep so well at night.”

For most viewers, it is an innocuous line that adds to the film’s unsettling tone. But for a small yet vocal group of conspiracy theorists, Kubrick was trying to warn the world about a depraved elite underbelly. And following the US Justice Department’s release of three million pages from the Epstein files, naming powerful figures including Bill Clinton, Elon Musk, Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump, those theories are growing louder.

“Eyes Wide Shut is a documentary. The elites are a bunch of depraved, murderous psychopaths,” reads one post on X. Some claim there are hidden Satanic pentagrams in the background (the film makes no explicit reference to Satan). One particularly bizarre suggestion implies that two extras walking behind lead actress Nicole Kidman in one scene are “shadowy depictions of Epstein and Ghislaine [Maxwell]”. Another video, which has more than 500,000 likes on Instagram, bears the caption: “The fact the director died four days after releasing this film doesn’t sit right with me.”

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In reality, Kubrick died of a heart attack in March 1999, aged 70, four months before Eyes Wide Shut was released in the US.

The film focuses on the couple Bill Harford (Cruise) and Alice (Kidman) – who were married in real life at the time. After getting stoned, Alice reveals she once considered sacrificing their marriage for an affair with a naval officer. Frustrated and unsettled, Bill wanders the streets of New York, trying to make sense of sex, fidelity and power within marriage. He is then invited by an old college friend to a mysterious costume party outside the city, where he witnesses ritualistic orgies attended by masked participants.

Cruise and Kidman star as a wealthy New York couple whose relationship is shaken by temptation and betrayal. Photo / Getty Images

Most of the supposed connections between convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and Eyes Wide Shut are purely referential. In the Epstein files themselves, the film is mentioned around a dozen times, largely in supplementary articles. The most explicit reference appears in a 2016 email exchange between Epstein and an individual whose name has been redacted. “I am trying to find high-end Eyes Wide Shut parties – do you know any?” the person writes. Epstein never replied.

US news anchor Katie Couric, who visited Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion in New York’s Manhattan for a party in December 2010, once described the evening as “Eyes Wide Shut with a twist”. She did not elaborate on the similarities, but recalled “creepy chandeliers and body-part art” inside the house. She also said that when their coats were taken by several women, her boyfriend at the time remarked on how young they all looked.

The party was attended by a number of celebrities, including Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, comedian Chelsea Handler and TV anchor George Stephanopoulos. Coincidentally, Woody Allen – a friend of Epstein’s who was also present – had reportedly once been considered to star in an earlier, more comedic version of Eyes Wide Shut that Kubrick was planning in the 1970s.

This image of Andrew on all fours beside a woman was among the three million documents recently released in connection with Epstein. Photo / Getty Images

Kubrick’s collaborators have been quick to dismiss the film’s conspiracy theories.

“I don’t think Stanley gave a flying f*** about warning the world about anything,” Frederic Raphael, the film’s co-screenwriter, told Vulture last year. In the same article, Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s producing partner and brother-in-law, said: “I can assure you that all of these speculations are total nonsense.”

What’s more, rather than drawing on real-life events, the film was based on the 1926 novella Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler. Aside from the setting and a few minor changes, Eyes Wide Shut is a faithful adaptation of Schnitzler’s work.

Masked participants in the ritualistic orgy scene at the centre of Eyes Wide Shut, later claimed by theorists to have been heavily cut. Photo / Alamy

Kubrick, however, is no stranger to overblown interpretations of his films. An entire documentary, Room 237, focuses on the sane and the outlandish theories surrounding his 1980 horror classic The Shining, including claims it serves as a metaphor for the Holocaust or the cultural assimilation of Native Americans.

Most notably, after the release of his 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, his name began circulating in conspiracy theories suggesting he was involved in staging the moon landing.

So why Kubrick? Unlike many Hollywood film-makers, he lived outside the US and cultivated a reputation as a recluse, adding to his mystique. To some, he appeared an outsider who made highly commercial films entirely on his own terms. That image of a detail-obsessed auteur fed the notion he was a kind of prophet. The shrouded secrecy of the production – which ran to a record 400 days of shooting – also contributed to the strange hold Eyes Wide Shut retains over viewers.

As the film’s title suggests, its storyline blurs the boundary between reality and dream. Perhaps conspiracy theorists read too much into Dr Harford’s words in the final scene: “No dream is ever just a dream.”

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