Kubrick, Borowczyk and lingering on the real

This week I achieved something I wondered if I would ever manage: After three failed attempts, I finally watched Eyes Wide Shut from start to finish. My previous tries left me cold and somewhat disoriented by the awkward and exaggerated performances, and an uncomfortable sense that everything was slightly...off. I wasn’t sure if it was the film or me.

But something changed between my last attempt a couple of years ago and now: I recently immersed myself in the cinematic world of Walerian Borowczyk, a director whose work, such as Blanche, Immoral Tales and The Beast—is both shockingly raw and quietly poetic, blending the tactile world of the everyday with surreal fantasy.

Seeing Eyes Wide Shut again through the lens of Borowczyk’s sensibilities transformed it into an entirely different experience. What once seemed lumbering and disjointed now felt deliberate, even meticulous. Kubrick’s patience and attention to detail began to make sense in a way that it simply hadn’t before.

One of the key parallels between Kubrick and Borowczyk is how they let a scene linger—giving it time and space to breathe in real time. This contrasts sharply with the hyper-edited, fast-paced rhythm of most modern Hollywood cinema, where ideas are spoon-fed to the audience in quick, prepackaged bites that play to well-known tropes and cliches, and are then assembled into a whole rather like a patchwork quilt or stickers in a children’s album.

Both Kubrick and Borowczyk, on the other hand, create something closer to animation or heightened realism, where small details are amplified in a way that can make scene seem more real than reality itself. In Borowczyk’s films, the sounds of everyday activity are left in the soundtrack and the camera hesitates in much the same way as a person would in the moment, giving the scenes a raw immediacy. You are acutely aware of the physicality of the world in which the characters inhabit and its textures.

Kubrick’s approach in Eyes Wide Shut feels similarly grounded in detail. What once seemed absurdly awkward—scenes that linger too long, dialogue delivered in stilted rhythms—now appears to be an intentional focus on the everyday, allowing moments to build naturally. The pauses, the silences, the uncomfortable pacing become integral to the tension, drawing us deeper into the characters’ emotional disorientation, as we see them struggle to process something of great import.

Both directors also share a fondness for unusual camera angles that initially disorient the viewer, only to reveal a deeper sense of presence within the scene. Kubrick’s tracking shots create a detached, almost dreamlike experience, while Borowczyk’s framing is often intimate and painterly, evoking Renaissance compositions. What feels confusing at first soon becomes immersive, drawing the viewer into the emotional and physical reality of the characters.

The two directors also share an ambiguous relationship with eroticism, which can quickly veer into the ridiculous or unsettling. Kubrick’s depiction of the infamous masked orgy in Eyes Wide Shut is as unsettling as it is oddly mundane: ritualistic, formal and emotionally detached. Borowczyk’s eroticism is far more primal, often grotesque and rooted in raw human urges (The Beast, anyone?), yet both directors share a knack for blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality.

In both cases, this ambiguity leaves the viewer feeling torn, unsure how to respond—much as one can to sex itself—as the scene swings from the deeply intimate to the absurdly awkward in a heartbeat. What fascinates me is that this approach refuses to give the audience a clear emotional cue. Should we be aroused? Horrified? Embarrassed? All of those things, simultaneously.

Where Kubrick and Borowczyk differ is in their treatment of the heroic and the ordinary. Kubrick’s characters—particularly in Eyes Wide Shut—are stylized, almost abstracted versions of real people. Tom Cruise’s Bill Harford is less a person than an avatar for the audience’s confusion, a cipher wandering through a cold, surreal dreamscape.

Borowczyk, by contrast, brings his characters down to earth through naturalism. He films with what feels like natural light, capturing the accidental sounds and movements of life: feet scuffing along wooden floors, a door creaking open, voices coming into focus only as they approach. This technique grounds the characters in the real world, stripping away artifice and forcing us to confront them as people rather than symbols.

In Blanche, for example, we feel every creak of the castle’s floors, every whisper of fabric, every clank of armor. These sensory details pull us into the world—not as spectators of a grand medieval tragedy, but as participants. The characters are no longer distant heroes; they are vulnerable, human, struggling in their circumstances just like we would, and we sense that struggle in what feels like real time.

Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut achieves something similar in moments—the way he frames domestic spaces or lingers on Cruise and Kidman’s unspoken tensions, and follows Cruise’s nocturnal journeys through the streets of New York—but it retains a sense of detachment that Borowczyk eagerly, if not always joyfully, abandons.

Perhaps the most striking difference between Kubrick and Borowczyk lies in how they approach female characters and female desire. Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut teases us with Alice (Nicole Kidman), a character who seems central but is often left at the margins of the story. Her confession of desire destabilizes Bill’s entire sense of reality and sends him on his downward spiral, yet we are rarely allowed inside her world. Alice remains a mystery—a symbol rather than a fully realized person. While she is crucial to the narrative’s emotional disintegration, she is kept at a distance.

Borowczyk’s female characters, by contrast, are far more central and active in their own stories. In Blanche, the titular character is trapped by her circumstances, but her emotional life is front and center. We are invited to live through her experiences, to feel her longing, frustration and vulnerability in a way Kubrick doesn’t allow with Alice. In The Beast, we watch Lucy Broadhurst’s tortured journey and increasing sense of frustration as she navigates her burgeoning desires, ultimately unrealised. Borowczyk’s women are therefore rarely symbols; they are fully embodied figures, and the narrative often belongs to them more than to the men who surround them.

In this sense, Borowczyk’s films feel more intimate, more visceral. His characters’ desires—particularly the female ones—are raw and immediate, without the cold intellectual distance that Kubrick maintains. It’s an approach that demands more from the audience emotionally and rewards them with a deeper connection to the characters.

Both directors also have a penchant for subverting rituals and symbols of the sacred, transforming them into something unsettling or profane. In Eyes Wide Shut, the masked orgy is framed almost like a black mass—a parody of religious ceremony, imbued with menace and moral ambiguity. Kubrick leaves us questioning the purpose of these rituals and the power structures they reinforce.

Borowczyk’s subversions are less clinical and more visceral. In The Beast, the rituals surrounding marriage become grotesque, exposing the primal and animalistic impulses beneath the veneer of civility. These moments challenge our perception of tradition and force us to confront the thin line between the sacred and the profane. Moreover, his treatment of priests and other members of the cloth lays bare the contradictions and hypocrisies in the Catholic Church, with which we have become sadly all-too familiar.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two directors is in how they have been treated by history. Kubrick’s legacy is firmly established: he is universally regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Eyes Wide Shut, initially dismissed, has undergone significant reassessment, and is now considered a masterpiece of psychological and existential cinema.

Borowczyk’s legacy, however, is only now beginning to be fully appreciated. Long dismissed as a purveyor of softcore erotica, his work is being re-evaluated as a rich, complex body of cinema that blends high art with the primal and the surreal. Filmmakers like Terry Gilliam and critics have championed his work (his influence is seen all over Monty Python’s body of work), and recent restorations have brought his films back into the spotlight, revealing their depth and artistry.

Ultimately, what ties Kubrick and Borowczyk together for me is their desire to speak to the viewer rather than at them. Both directors reject the rapid-paced editing style of mainstream cinema, which so often delivers a prepackaged, off-the-shelf emotional response. Instead, they leave space for us to feel uncertain, unsettled and contemplative.

There’s something oddly comforting in this rawness and ambiguity. It feels more truthful, more human—even when it becomes fantastical or surreal. Consequently, the scenes stay with you, haunting your thoughts long after the film is over.

For me, that’s the magic of both Kubrick and Borowczyk: they trust the audience to make their own sense of the chaos, to linger in the awkwardness and uncertainty, and in doing so experience something profoundly real.