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When Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was released in the summer of 1999, the world shrugged. Critics didn’t know what to do with it, treating it less like the final statement of a master filmmaker and more like a bootlegged work print — understandable, given that Kubrick, who typically fussed over his movies until the last possible second, had died that March, just days after delivering a semi-finished cut to Warner Bros. The studio and his estate made the remaining tweaks. Meanwhile, audiences had been primed by the marketing to expect an explicit, boundary-pushing erotic thriller featuring an extended orgy sequence that almost triggered an NC-17 rating. What they got instead was much tamer: a slow-motion marital drama about a Manhattan doctor (Tom Cruise), rattled by his wife’s (Nicole Kidman) confession of an adulterous fantasy, who drifts through a series of lustful but unconsummated encounters before crashing a masked sex party thrown by an elite secret society in a Long Island mansion. The film’s dreamlike atmosphere veered toward the surreal, with Cruise and Kidman doing the weirdest acting of their lives and the orgygoers’ portrayal — the masks, the password, the choreography — striking many viewers as more goofy than sexy or sinister.

But Kubrick’s movies have a habit of aging into new meanings, like monoliths that take time for us apes to figure out, and Eyes Wide Shut eventually came to be seen in a different light. Beyond the orgy, there are subtler, more disturbing moments — including a scene in which a costume-shop owner appears to offer his underage daughter to Cruise’s character — that hint at a world where sex, power, and predation blur. With hindsight, those undertones seemed to foreshadow real-world horrors to come. In the 2010s, Pizzagate and QAnon dragged rumors of elite sex-trafficking rings from the fringes into the mainstream of American paranoia. Then came Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest and death, and suddenly an underappreciated film from two decades earlier started to look like an uncanny premonition.

After a while, some began to wonder if perhaps Eyes Wide Shut hadn’t been a little too prescient. Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist who spent years on each of his films and demanded dozens, sometimes hundreds, of takes per scene. So, the thinking went, every costume, prop, and line reading is there for a reason, infinite symbolism scattered across the frame for anyone determined enough to decipher it. This was the logic that led some to believe that he’d helped NASA fake the moon landing and then confessed to it by putting Danny Torrance in an Apollo 11 sweater in The Shining. That idea, along with a handful of even farther-fetched ones, was presented without comment in Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary, Room 237, a film presumably meant to mock such readings that may have only encouraged them. And Kubrick didn’t exactly tamp down the mythmaking. In the final years of his life, he rarely left his estate north of London and all but stopped giving interviews, allowing his work to speak for itself — and, in the absence of explanation, to be interpreted however anyone pleased. So when Eyes Wide Shut seemed to anticipate a scandal that wouldn’t come fully into view until decades later, it raised a question: What if Kubrick knew?

Soon, in exactly the parts of the internet you’d expect, a conspiracy theory took shape: Kubrick had made Eyes Wide Shut as a warning, an exposé of an actual pedophile cult hiding in plain sight among the global elite. The masked orgy wasn’t just a metaphor — for the sexual hypocrisies of the upper class, or the transactional nature of intimacy, or the secret compromises of monogamy, or whatever — it was a re-enactment of what really happened behind mansion doors. And once the wrong people caught wind of it, they had Kubrick killed so that the movie could be reedited to scrub the most incriminating details. Some claim an entire 24 minutes were cut. And yet, the theory goes, Kubrick had so masterfully embedded his clues in the film that some of them survived the posthumous meddling.

There are multiple strains of this theory, each with its own twist on which real cabal Kubrick was supposedly exposing. Some point to the usual suspects — the Illuminati, Bohemian Grove, garden-variety Satanists. Others zoom in on the Rothschild family, noting that it once owned the 19th-century mansion used for some of the movie’s orgy exteriors. Others go a few steps further, claiming that Eyes Wide Shut was not just predictive of Epstein’s crimes; it was literally about him. (The evidence? Well, for starters, in a party scene near the beginning of the movie, a couple idling behind Kidman is said to look like Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, or at least the man has gray hair.)

Across these variants, one detail is usually cited as the smoking gun. In the movie’s last scene, Bill and Alice Harford (Cruise and Kidman) are walking through a toy store with their young daughter, Helena (Madison Eginton). Just before credits roll, Helena is shown standing near two adult male extras — who, believers claim, also appear at the party that opens the film — and then following them as they head toward another aisle. This half-second beat, according to breathless video essays and blog posts stitched together from freeze-frames, is Kubrick’s final, chilling reveal: The Harfords have handed their daughter over to the cult.

This theory has become surprisingly popular. Versions of it circulate constantly on Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok, where today Kubrick may be remembered less as a filmmaker than as a whistleblower who died for telling the truth about high-society pedophiles. And if it once lived mainly in the sewers of social media, it broke into the daylight in December of last year, when Roger Avary, the co-writer of Pulp Fiction and the director of The Rules of Attraction, laid out his own variation of the conspiracy on The Joe Rogan Experience.

On the podcast, Avary told Rogan that he’d recently reread his copy of the Eyes Wide Shut shooting script, and it had gotten him thinking about all the ways the movie might’ve been different if Kubrick had lived. “It’s definitely missing third-person narration,” he said, arguing that, in particular, the scene where Cruise visits a morgue seems designed for voice-over. Avary also discussed the toy-store theory: “You see those two guys walking off with the daughter. They’re taking her away. They’ve given their daughter to the pedo cult.” Then he relayed a story he’d heard — secondhand, he admitted — about an early screening of the movie for studio executives. According to Avary, “There were people who were outside of the theater who could hear inside of the theater Kubrick yelling at all the executives and saying, ‘It’s my movie! You can’t cut it! You can’t fucking cut my film!’ Big argument going on and then he dies like four days later.”

I should probably unmask myself here as a skeptic of this alleged conspiracy, which strains credulity not just for interpretive reasons but also for extremely basic logistical ones. If someone had truly uncovered an elite sex-trafficking operation and wanted to alert the public, why on earth would he spend years of his life and a studio’s $65 million making a coded allegory about it rather than, say, telling the police or a reporter? And even if you grant that premise, why would a panicked sex cult — powerful enough to murder an internationally beloved director — then allow the film to play, even in sanitized form, on thousands of screens around the world? 

These theories may have once been a fun way to overread a slippery movie, but lately they seem to be on the verge of overtaking it. And with a new Criterion Collection 4K remaster of the film available, the hunt for “hidden clues” seems likely to intensify as every Christmas light and billiard ball can now be scrutinized in even higher resolution.

That would be a shame. Eyes Wide Shut is a movie I love and one I think ranks among Kubrick’s best. For all its controlled craft, it’s looser, stranger, and more dramatically flammable than anything else he ever made. It’s also unclassifiable, never bothering to explain what exactly it is. That ambiguity is part of its power, but it’s also the void into which conspiracists pour their fantasies. Before those fantasies become the movie’s legacy, I wondered if a few calls and emails to people who worked on the film might bring some clarity.

Many were happy to help. “I can assure you that all of these speculations are total nonsense,” says Jan Harlan, a producer of five Kubrick movies as well as the director’s brother-in-law. “Stanley would’ve found these people amusing,” says Anthony Frewin, Kubrick’s longtime assistant and archivist. “This is spurious and unfounded, just another fine example of the irrelevant rubbish that followed Kubrick throughout his career,” says Nigel Galt, Eyes Wide Shut’s editor. “It’s ludicrous to think that, at that time, Kubrick would’ve been aware of Jeffrey Epstein,” says Denise Chamian, one of the film’s casting directors. “I don’t think Stanley gave a flying fuck about warning the world about anything,” says Kubrick’s co-writer, Frederic Raphael. (Cruise and Kidman declined through representatives to participate in this story.)

It’s not just that it’s doubtful or unprovable that Kubrick made Eyes Wide Shut to disrupt a secret clan of wealthy pedophiles, say his collaborators. It’s that the theory is untethered from everything we know about the movie’s origins. Eyes Wide Shut is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella, Traumnovelle, which Kubrick was already discussing in 1968 as a potential follow-up to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He bought the rights in 1970 — when Jeffrey Epstein was still a teenager — and at one point considered adapting it as a comedy, possibly with Steve Martin in the lead. He returned to the material on and off over the years but focused on other projects for nearly three decades. If he was really on a mission to thwart real-world sex trafficking, he wasn’t in much of a hurry.

Also, what many now interpret as Kubrick’s exposé of elite perverts was, in fact, mostly Schnitzler’s doing. Eyes Wide Shut is an extremely faithful adaptation of Traumnovelle. “Of course you can see where it varies,” says Raphael, who was hired to help with the screenplay in 1994, “but the basis of the movie is still the Schnitzler story, and Stanley always insisted that we preserve its beats.” The novella includes all of the film’s major characters and story elements — including the doctor, his wife’s fantasy, the sex worker whose services he declines, the piano player who sneaks him the orgy password, and the mysterious woman who sacrifices herself to save him — except it’s set in early-20th-century Vienna instead of 1990s New York and its protagonist is named Fridolin instead of Bill. It was even adapted into an Austrian TV movie in 1969, and that version’s plot is largely the same as Kubrick’s.

The people I spoke to also say they doubt Kubrick had any special knowledge of real-world sex cults, and the one in Eyes Wide Shut was something he was still trying to conceptualize as he made the film. In Raphael’s 1999 memoir, Eyes Wide Open, he recalls that Kubrick wasn’t entirely sure what might motivate such a group. At one point, he asked Raphael to help fill in the blanks, so the writer drafted a backstory in the form of a fake FBI dossier, an imagined history of a clandestine network of powerful hedonists called “the Free” who murdered anyone who leaked their secrets. He faxed it to Kubrick, who promptly called, worried that Raphael had somehow hacked into an FBI computer. When the writer explained he’d made the whole thing up, Kubrick was relieved. “Okay. As long as we’re not,” he said, “on potentially dangerous ground here.” As Raphael tells me, “If Stanley had known about anything like that in real life, I’m sure he would’ve been much too apprehensive to get anywhere near it.”

For help imagining Eyes Wide Shut’s orgy sequence, Kubrick sought the expertise of two unconventional scholars: Gershon Legman, an erotic folklorist who provided historical context on the sexual customs of Schnitzler-era Vienna, and Dr. C.J. Scheiner, a New York emergency-room physician with a Ph.D. in erotology, who, over a series of long phone calls, gave him a crash course in 4,000 years of group sex. As production neared, Kubrick asked Scheiner about his personal knowledge of modern orgies. “I had, as a nonparticipating observer, researched this part of the social scene since the 1960s and had extensive first- and secondhand knowledge of American and European organized group sexual activity, from home parties to elegant weekend orgies in a château outside of Paris,” Scheiner tells me. Nothing in their conversations, he says, suggested the film was inspired by any real sex cult. And, “based on the questions he asked,” Scheiner adds, “my impression is that Kubrick had no — or very little — firsthand experience with orgies himself.”

Much of the conspiracy talk around Eyes Wide Shut centers on another of the film’s advisors: Larry Celona, a longtime New York Post reporter who’s credited as a “media consultant” — for one scene, Kubrick had him write a mock Post article about the death of Mandy, the woman who spares Cruise’s character from the cult’s punishment by offering herself in his place. In 2019, Celona happened to break the news of Epstein’s death, a coincidence some found too eerie to ignore. But, as Celona tells me, he’s a crime reporter for New York’s biggest tabloid, “so it’s not a far reach that I’d be the first to know” about a famous death in the city. (He was also the first to report JFK Jr.’s fatal plane crash, which occurred, in another uncanny coincidence, on July 16, 1999, the same day Eyes Wide Shut opened in theaters. In certain corners of the internet, this alignment of dates is treated like the Rosetta stone; in QAnon lore, JFK Jr. didn’t die at all but supposedly went into hiding to join a generations-long war against elite pedophiles.) Later, some theorists’ heads nearly exploded when they thought they saw “Celona” listed in Epstein’s private-jet logs, but it turned out to be sloppy handwriting; the name was actually “Celina,” which might have been Celina Midelfart, a known Epstein associate. “I obviously was never on Epstein’s plane — I’ve never met him,” Celona says. He did speak to Kubrick by phone a couple of times, but they never discussed Epstein. “Kubrick was born in the Bronx,” Celona says, “so he wanted to talk about the Yankees.”

Even the fake Post story Celona wrote for Kubrick has been overscrutinized. Some viewers noticed that a line in the second paragraph is repeated twice — a “mistake” that, to them, suggests hidden meaning. Celona noticed it, too, but never found out why it was left in. He suggests I ask Frewin, Kubrick’s former assistant, about it, and when I do, Frewin sounds surprised: “I never noticed that, and I was the one who had it typeset. Oh well, it adds to the authenticity.”

Eyes Wide Shut had a reputation for opacity even before the internet got involved. It was an unusually secretive project. Working mostly in London’s Pinewood Studios, Kubrick employed only a small crew, kept the set tightly controlled, and filmed for a long time. Production began in November 1996 and lasted for more than 15 months, a Guinness World Record for the longest continuous shoot in history. So he must have filmed much more than what ended up in the movie, right?

There were outtakes — “snippets which did not make it into the film,” says producer Jan Harlan — but nothing that would’ve gotten Kubrick in hot water with any real sex cults, say his collaborators. By most accounts, the director spent the bulk of the shoot filming take after take of the scenes that do appear in the movie. One story that’s passed into legend has the director forcing Cruise to walk through a doorway 95 times before deeming the performance believable. (Cruise, who now regularly flings himself off cliffs for fun, reportedly developed an ulcer during production.)

Madison Eick (née Eginton), who played Helena, the Harfords’ daughter, and turned 8 during the production, hasn’t given many interviews about Eyes Wide Shut since its original release. Only in retrospect did she realize how unique the shooting process was. “I never saw a full script,” she says. “In the majority of my scenes, the dialogue was improvised. Stanley would tell us the premise of the scene and then we would rehearse and rehearse and just talk naturally. There’s a scene where I talk about wanting a dog for Christmas, and all of that was improvised.” She recalls that Kubrick applied his obsessive precision to even small moments, including one brief scene that takes place in front of the Harfords’ bathroom mirror. “Stanley had me brush my teeth for — I’m not kidding — two weeks,” she says. “He was like, ‘Why aren’t you spitting while you’re brushing your teeth?’ And I was like, ‘I just spit at the end.’ And he wanted me to spit and then keep going back to brushing.” Eick is now 36 and retired from film acting. “My dentist just told me my gums are starting to recede, and I wonder if that’s why,” she joked.

When I ask Eick about the talk around the toy-store scene — the cornerstone of the entire conspiracy theory, in which some viewers claim her character is being handed off to cult members — she tells me it’s news to her. “There wasn’t ever any secret meaning about that scene that was communicated to me,” she says. “There was definitely never any suggestion from Stanley that I should go and stand by or walk off with two men.” Were those men the same background actors who also appear at the party scene at the beginning of the movie? Harlan admits that “they were from the same pool of extras” — but even if they were the same performers, it was “not deliberate. There is no ‘meaning’” to it, he says.

Some of the more baroque readings of the scene assign symbolic weight to the toys Helena picks up as she moves through the store, including a stuffed tiger (supposedly a callback to a similar toy seen earlier in the film in a sex worker’s bedroom) and a Barbie (a stand-in for sexualized innocence). Eick waves this off too. “I remember that I was improvising,” she says, “and the toys I picked up were just the ones I wanted, not because anyone told me to.”

After the shoot wrapped, Kubrick and the editor Galt spent the next 15 months shaping Eyes Wide Shut into more or less the exact movie you now know, says the latter. According to Galt, the last version Kubrick touched was “pretty much identical” to the one released in theaters. “After we showed Warner Bros. a cut,” he says, “Stanley and I discussed the things that remained outstanding. This was mostly about changing or adding a couple of establishing shots. The main titles had been set. The orgy scene is exactly the same length now as it was at the time of Stanley’s passing, and not a frame of that has ever changed” — aside from a few strategically placed computer-generated cloaked figures, added after Kubrick’s death to obscure the most explicit action and secure an R rating. Galt says that throughout the long postproduction process, to the best of his memory, Kubrick never once hinted at any real-life cults. “I sat next to Stanley in the edit room for 15 months, and the news that held his attention at the time was the war in Kosovo and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.”

The edit was nearly complete, the finishing touches underway. Then, on March 7, 1999, Kubrick died. It probably wasn’t foul play. “He had a bad heart and died in his bedroom,” says Harlan. “He was 70 years old and looked about 120,” says Raphael. “He was very stressed, and producing that movie was enough to kill him. Nobody needed to hire anyone to do it.”

Of course, it’s always possible that everyone I spoke to was either in on a cover-up or too afraid of being murdered by a sex cult themselves to tell me the truth. Perhaps they coordinated their stories and lied. But if so, they didn’t coordinate very well. On some points, they directly contradicted each other. For example, Raphael insists that Sydney Pollack — who plays Victor Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut and is an Oscar-winning director himself — did some editing work on the film’s billiards scene after Kubrick’s death. Galt calls this “utter nonsense.”

But one thing nearly everyone seems to agree on is that they’re dubious of what Roger Avary told Joe Rogan. Frewin says it’s “very unlikely” that Avary ever got his hands on a real shooting script for Eyes Wide Shut. Nobody I spoke to believed the film was missing any narration, either. A couple of Raphael’s early drafts included voice-over, but that idea was abandoned before postproduction. “Stanley never discussed the possibility of using narration during the edit,” says Galt.

And that explosive screening Avary claims to have heard about, the one where Kubrick supposedly got into a shouting match with studio execs? It never happened, according to Kubrick’s collaborators, who tell me Eyes Wide Shut had only three screenings while its director was still alive and there were no arguments at any of them. On March 2, 1999, Galt flew a print to New York and showed it first to Warner Bros. bosses Terry Semel and Bob Daly, then later that day to Cruise and Kidman, while Kubrick stayed home in England awaiting their reactions, which were reportedly positive. On March 5, two days before Kubrick’s death, Cruise’s then-publicist, Pat Kingsley, watched it alone in the director’s home. “I didn’t see Stanley that day because he had a cold and stayed upstairs,” Kingsley tells me. “But we talked afterward by phone. I told him I was mesmerized by the movie.”

Still, maybe Avary knows something I don’t. He’s an Oscar winner and presumably knows more Illuminati than I do, so who am I to doubt him? I sent him an email. He initially agreed to talk, then disappeared for months, then finally replied to questions from a New York fact-checker.

Avary says he heard the anecdote about the post-screening fight from “a William Morris agent who claimed to have been outside the screening room of the studio in England.” He says it “should be taken with a grain of salt” and that he mentioned it on Rogan only because the agent in question is now deceased. As for his copy of the screenplay, he says that it’s dated August 4, 1996, and that it was given to him by a key member of the filmmaking team. It does include narration, notably during the morgue scene.

Asked about the toy-store sequence, Avary suggests Kubrick may not have shared the scene’s alleged subtext with Madison Eick. “I’ve worked with child actresses myself, and you never tell them everything,” he says. “In fact, you never tell any actor everything that’s happening. Too much information, especially for a child, creates a false artifice.” He also notes that his version of the script mentions, at several points, two anonymous men — like the ones who supposedly kidnap Helena — who seem to be trailing Cruise’s character.

The script Avary describes appears to match the purported early draft of Eyes Wide Shut that has circulated online for years. (Avary says his “was not downloaded from the internet and looks completely different.”) Neither Frewin or Galt or Harlan say they can confirm the legitimacy of that version, though some of its elements do correspond with fragments that are apparently preserved in the Kubrick archives. In any case, in this supposed draft, there is no suggestion that Helena is kidnapped. There’s no toy-store scene at all.

None of this, however, is likely to put a stop to any theorizing. Kubrick made movies in a time when ambiguity was better tolerated, a pact with the audience now seems outdated. Today’s viewers, trained by prestige TV, true-crime podcasts, and algorithmically optimized streaming movies—where characters routinely announce who they are, what they want, and what everything means—demand legibility. When a film refuses answers, or defies a single, authoritative meaning, it can feel less ambiguous than deliberately redacted. It’s not lost on me that, in undertaking this reporting, I was chasing a definitive answer, too.

“Kubrick’s films are riddled with knowledge of secret societies,” Avary says. “And Eyes Wide Shut feels like his most direct shot at it. It’s explicitly about a hidden elite cult wielding sex, death, and influence as tools of control. Eyes Wide Shut ends up feeling like a final chess move against power.” But, he adds, “it’s not that I endorse these conspiracy theories. It’s just cinema speculation, which for a suspicious guy like me and as a fan of Kubrick is fun to posit.”