Stanley Kubrick's extraordinary last testament, Eyes Wide Shut, has effortlessly attained one of the criteria of a certain type of classic. It is in a genre, if not a league, of its own, this genre being best described as Manhattan porn gothic. It has left critics uneasily aware of the possibility that it is not a masterpiece, but rather a grotesque, preposterous flop that embarrassingly damages one of the most unimpeachable reputations in cinema.

However, it is the very preposterousness of Eyes Wide Shut that is the key to the achievement it represents: it has a singular excessiveness—at once gamey, florid and enigmatically deadpan—that underpins the rich, sensuous style. From the very first frames, Kubrick's imperious command of his material is evident. It shimmers with weird self-possession; it is radioactive with suppressed pornographic creepiness. And the batsqueak of hysteria and absurdity is essential to this fable of erotic paranoia and erotic discontent within the bourgeois marriage. The principals are Wasp and wealthy: Dr Bill Harford and his exquisite wife, Alice (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman), whom we see preparing to go out to a spiffy Manhattan Christmas party. Once there, Alice has too much champagne to mind her husband flirting with two models, while she is close-dancing with an elegantly groomed, silver-haired Hungarian, who murmurs provocatively, in an outrageous accent: “Did you ever read the Latin poet Ovid on the art of love?” Alice smirkingly returns that he died tearful and alone, and it is in this scholarly exchange, and probably this alone, that the distinctive residual presence of Kubrick's co-writer, Frederic Raphael, is still detectable.

Later, under the influence of pot (more bohemian daring) Dr and Mrs Harford start to argue about sex, and Alice confesses to a fantasy about a young naval officer she glimpsed the previous summer. Enraged yet obscurely excited by this admission, the hitherto faithful Bill embarks on a sexual odyssey in the Manhattan night, culminating in a bizarre masked orgy in a remote country house, presided over by a satanic, robed Master of the Revels. Sydney Pollack gives a terrific performance as the worldly, libertine party host.

Eyes Wide Shut is very faithful to Arthur Schnitzler's Viennese novel Traumnovelle, but it loses one of its most important features: the implication that the hero and his wife are Jewish. Without that, we do not have the savour of their aspirational qualities; we lose the significance of the hero being jostled in the street, an event that Kubrick reproduces, assigning the role of the aggressors to boorish jocks. Most importantly, we lose some of the socio-sexual aspect of the couple's discontent: the sense of how close sexual rejection is to social exclusion, and the sense that high society is like a thrillingly decadent party to which one is not invited.

Cruise and Kidman are white-bread white folks, but their prissy, uptight blandness is something that is all too plausible in this context—in fact, it is debatable how far the actors realised how objectionable Kubrick was occasionally making them appear, particularly with touches such as Tom Cruise's black gloves, fastidiously worn outdoors.

The key moment is, of course, the orgy, with lots of naked women in masks and thongs swaying and sashaying about in that classy, thoroughbred way essential to a certain pornographic imagination.

Updike wrote that anal penetration was the “black mass” of sexual performance—Kubrick's febrile movie effectively extends this metaphor to all sexual congress: sex is the “black mass” of human relationships, and it is the secrecy and unknowability of the sex act that is at the centre of this picture. And for all Dr and Mrs Harford's pinched and unhappy preoccupation with it, the only sex acts we see occurring are at the orgy. Tom Cruise never has sex with anyone on camera; and he, Kidman, and the audience are finally left, not with the lineaments of gratified desire, nor even post-coital tristesse, but simply an insubstantial impression of some unlocatable, insoluble mystery within the human condition. The couple's final, emotional reconciliation posits an equivalence between actual sexual adventures and those fantasies undertaken in dreams, narratives of sexual transgression that can be simultaneously acknowledged and denied: the significance, perhaps, of that less than euphonious title, Eyes Wide Shut.

Kubrick's last film works only if its satirical, mischievous quality is fully appreciated; as an essay on the nature of sexuality it is vulgar and pretentious, but taken as a bizarre, hallucinatory black comic fable about married life, it is plausible and enjoyable. The technical and visual command of this movie is captivating—but it is a minor Kubrick.