The final work of legendary director Stanley Kubrick, who died
within a week of completing the edit, stars Tom Cruise and Nicole
Kidman, at the time Hollywood’s most bankable celebrity couple, and was
shot on a open-ended schedule (finally totaling over 400 days), with
closed sets in London standing in for New York City.
Cruise
and Kidman play William and Alice Harford, a physician and a gallery
manager who are wealthy, successful, and travel in a sophisticated
social circle; however, a certain amount of decadence crosses their
paths on occasion, and a visit to a formal-dress party leads them into
sexual temptation when William is drafted into helping a beautiful girl
who has overdosed on drugs while Alice is charmed by a man bent on
seduction. While neither William and Alice act on their adulterous
impulses, once the issue has been brought into the open, it begins a
dangerous season of erotic gamesmanship for the couple, with William in
particular openly confronting his desire for new sexual experiences.