Erotic desire is not simply a desire for recognition the constitution of a message, an act of communication or an exchange: it is a mode of surface contact with things and substances, with a world, that engenders and induces transformations, intensifications and becoming something other. Not simply a rise and fall, a waxing and waining, but movement, processes transmutations. That is what constitutes the seduction and power of desire, its capacity to shake up, rearrange, reorganize the body's forms and sensations, to make the subject and body as such dissolve into something else other than what they are habitually. (Desire need not culminate – sexual intercourse, but may end in production.) The production of sensations never felt, alignments never thought, energies never tapped, regions never known.

Stanley Kubrick is a generous transcriber of appearances, pedantically exact in the details, insistent about where objects begin and end, what light and colour do, what gravity forms have. Here you are, his frames tell you, exactly here: this is what it looks like. Yet for all the apparent accessibility, Kubrick's world feels both remote and unfamiliar, somewhat staged and a little unsafe.

Dislocation seems intended. Embracing the obvious with apparent urgency, Kubrick's work forces us to confront and admit to the secrecy of the phenomenal world. By its exactitude and clarity, his work proclaims a suddenness: The brightness of the present moment. And yet something other than the present is offered – the trace of recent events or more potently, a premonition of events to come.

The characteristic stillness in Kubrick's frames endures no longer than the first glance. Quickly they vibrate, objects come apart. The glass is about to shatter; the mirror is about to crack. This is the moment Kubrick prolongs - to make us tense. The moment, eternalised by Kubrick's vision, nonetheless hangs on to its connection with real time, precisely to play upon the nerves. There is a consistent counter-motion in Kubrick's presentation of time and place. Violence is in the air, and under the clearest of skies.

Kubrick portrays menace in Eyes Wide Shut by the most subtle means; the clues are oblique barely suggestive. The burden of interpretation, the invention of narrative, unfolds elegantly.

In Kubrick's world, both place and objects are real but their condition is perilous, their permanence in doubt. Transformation (breakage as opposed to metamorphosis) is latent in his presentation of the solid in the context of real life, eternal in the context of art. This is the source of the characteristic quiet in Kubrick's films, which is nevertheless nothing if not disquieting.

In Eyes Wide Shut Kubrick's subject comes from an ontological bestiary. The concern is the thing that is both eternal and transitory, both real and non-existent. His subject is edges, of both characters and states. The borders that suggest those in-between states of both body and mind. He frames thresholds, the moment between sleep and waking, or between desire and action; the edge between the inner and outer worlds.

Time is also seen as an edge in Kubrick's world. Characteristically things are "about" to happen, although in some scenes the mysterious event may be one that has just passed. It is as if the moment of a scene were the moment of discovery – of a crime without any clue but the corpse. Sadism pervades like an exotic waft. Kubrick imagines disaster/ violence/violation, but he does not depict it directly. Instead he makes laconic and elegant suggestion, preserves the refinement of his sensibility by the delicacy of his treatment. He allows us to translate those "vibrations" in the film into our own "shudder", to make our own response to what his intentions pretends to deny is there at all. This is another of Kubrick's borders between desire and action, good and evil, where his is the desire, and "ours" the evil. Firmly marking the edge in the film, nevertheless he allows us to cross it, to complete his thought, and in a sense, the narrative and the transgression it almost names.

How does Kubrick manage to invite both contemplation of a fixed moment and, at the same time, our interference with it? Part of an explanation concerns the inherent "drama" of many of his scenes - "theatrical set-pieces" which point to a melodrama and suggest a narrative which if not yet played is certainly conceived. In other scenes, relationships are set up among the characters where meaning seems tantalisingly available, yet provocatively withheld.

The feel of instability is implanted in the film.

Kubrick's film is about those things which, like film, keep life at one remove, and at a distance – mirrors dreams and desire. Kubrick is too subtle a film-maker too self-censoring a symbolist, to make his disappointment with life, or his distrust of it – its violence – the central subject of Eyes Wide Shut, it seems rather to lie behind the characters as a kind of near-allegorical background.

The desired/feared experience may be hinted at. The sins of the dreamer, if they commit them, are sins of thought only, just as the adventures of the reader of a book takes place in the mind alone. The intensity derives not from the notion of fulfilled love than from "adolescent" desire, the peculiar intensity of which depends precisely on its non-fulfilment. It is a world of speculation and longing that Kubrick creates.