‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Was Made In 1999. After The Epstein Files, It Feels Like A Different Film
Is Eyes Wide Shut Actually About Jeffrey Epstein?
Since the Epstein files dropped, this question has been everywhere. The comparisons are hard to ignore.
- A secret network of powerful men.
- Ritualized exploitation behind closed doors.
- Vulnerable women treated as disposable.
- Anyone who gets too close either disappears or is silenced.
It feels like Kubrick was telling us something. But was he?
Here’s what’s actually true. The film was based on a 1926 novel called Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler. Kubrick wanted to adapt it for decades. It was shot between 1996 and 1998. Epstein was not a public figure at that time. Kubrick lived in England and famously refused to fly, making it unlikely he moved in Epstein’s circles.
But there are real, verified connections that are worth sitting with. Kubrick directed Lolita in 1962, the same book Epstein kept displayed across multiple homes. Marvin Minsky, who consulted on Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, was later named by an Epstein victim. Larry Celona, the veteran NYPD reporter who served as a media consultant on Eyes Wide Shut, later reported on Epstein’s death in his cell. And the film’s costume party was influenced by an actual Rothschild masquerade ball from the 1970s.
Those are real.
What’s not documented: that background extras are Epstein and Maxwell, that bull masks are Moloch worship, that the toy store scene is a child trafficking handoff, or that Kubrick was assassinated for what the film revealed. That’s pattern-matching driven by emotion.
One theory that keeps coming up: in the final toy store scene, Bill and Alice’s daughter Helena wanders off screen with two older men while her parents talk. Some viewers read this as the couple offering their child to the secret society in exchange for entry or protection. It’s one of the most debated moments in Kubrick’s entire filmography.
You can read it that way. Kubrick certainly framed the scene in a way that invites unease. But it’s worth noting that nothing in the actual text of the film confirms it, and the scene also works as two distracted parents in a store while their kid drifts toward the toy aisle. What makes it powerful is the ambiguity. After everything the audience has just watched, even an innocent moment feels suspicious. That might be the point.
But here’s the thing. The reason people want Kubrick to have “known” is because the alternative is harder to sit with. He didn’t need insider information. He just understood power. He understood what men with unlimited money and zero accountability will eventually do. He saw it in a novel from 1926. He put it on screen in 1999. And the world caught up.
His cinematographer Larry Smith said it best in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “I think we’re intelligent enough to understand just how the cards are stacked, aren’t we?”
Kubrick didn’t predict Jeffrey Epstein. He didn’t have to. He understood the system that would inevitably produce one. The film wasn’t a warning about a specific man. It was a warning about a world. And the fact that world turned out to be real is more disturbing than any conspiracy theory about hidden messages in the background of a party scene.
The clues were never in the film. They were always in plain sight.