Open your eyes to the festive film that's hiding in plain sight

Forget Die Hard, Eyes Wide

- Nathan Abrams

Shut is really the Christmas film hiding in plain sight, writes Nathan Abrams, professor of film studies at Bangor University.Released in 1999 and set entirely during the festive season, the film follows a doctor, Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), whose wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) admits she once considered an affair. Shaken, he becomes obsessed with pursuing his own sexual encounter and stumbles into an underground world of masked orgies and ritualised desire.

Director Stanley Kubrick chose Christmas after deciding that the original mardi gras setting from Arthur Schnitzler's novella wouldn't work in contemporary New York. Christmas offered the closest equivalent. After all, it's a modern period of ritual excess, indulgence and office-party transgressions.

It's also a season of overeating, drinking and heightened expectations, which makes it the perfect environment for exploring jealousy, deceit and desire, the film's defining concerns.

Kubrick also uses Christmas to highlight the thin line between social and sexual ritual. Both are governed by rules, masks and secrecy, and by the privileges of those with enough power or money to ignore the rules altogether.

In this, Kubrick was curiously prophetic, pointing to the predations of the likes of Jeffrey Epstein. Meanwhile, the lavishness hints at the world of Donald Trump, who, when Kubrick made the film, was just a real estate and hotel entrepreneur.