Tom Cruise has consistently shown a willingness throughout his career to apply his stardom to challenging projects and roles, beginning with his Oscar-worthy performance as Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic in the 1989 biographical drama film Born on the Fourth of July. With his performances as misogynistic dating guru Frank T.J. Mackey in the 1999 drama film Magnolia and cold-blooded assassin Vincent in the 2004 thriller film Collateral, Cruise also proved that he was unafraid to subvert audience expectations by playing unsympathetic characters.

This ambitious career approach is perhaps most clearly embodied in the 2001 psychological thriller film Vanilla Sky, in which Cruise plays a hedonistic New York playboy whose carefree lifestyle, along with his sense of reality, is completely upended after his handsome character, David Aames, is severely disfigured in a car crash. Like other mind-bending films, such as Memento and Mulholland Drive, Vanilla Sky, which is a remake of the 1997 Spanish thriller Open Your Eyes, requires audiences to think alongside David, whose subsequent struggle to distinguish between fantasy and reality leads him to question the validity of his very existence.

Despite being largely unappreciated by audiences and critics at the time of its release, Vanilla Sky has emerged as one of Cruise’s most visionary films, specifically in terms of the extent to which the preternaturally youthful-looking Cruise has, like David, achieved immortality.

Vanilla Sky Exists Between Dreams and Reality

The best way to approach Vanilla Sky, given the film’s is-it-all-a-dream plot structure, is to focus on the reality of the existence of Tom Cruise’s character, David Aames, who was a real person who lived in the real world. The blurring of the divide between fantasy and reality is established in the film’s haunting opening scene, in which he drives his Ferrari into Times Square, where he doesn’t see any people.

David lives in a post-Central Park West apartment, where bachelor David, the heir to a publishing empire, maintains a casual sexual relationship with an actress named Julie, though Julie, played by Cameron Diaz, sees this relationship in a much different light. At a birthday party celebration in his apartment, he meets an alluring woman named Sofia, played by Penélope Cruz, and spends the night at Sofia’s apartment, where he seemingly falls in love with her.

The end of David’s reality is heralded by his encounter with the stalking Julie outside Sofia’s apartment building the following morning. After getting into Julie’s car, Julie reveals her jealousy to David through a tirade about the importance of commitment before purposefully crashing the car, killing herself and leaving David disfigured. While he survives the crash, plastic surgery is unable to restore his handsome appearance, forcing him to wear a prosthetic mask amid crippling pain.

His reality continues when a depressed and withdrawn David encounters Sofia at a nightclub, where Sofia appears to be repulsed by his masked appearance. Reality ends for him outside the club, where a drunk and overdosed David collapses on a sidewalk before entering a lucid dreamlike state of suspended animation, in which he occupies a world of his mind’s own making.

Tom Cruise’s 1999 Erotic Thriller Is an Excellent Companion Piece to Vanilla Sky

Through its exploration of the shifting human perception of reality, Vanilla Sky is similar to Tom Cruise’s 1999 psychological drama film Eyes Wide Shut, in which Cruise plays Bill Harford, a seemingly happily married New York doctor whose grip on reality becomes strained after his wife, played by Nicole Kidman, confesses to Bill that she previously contemplated having an affair with another man. This revelation prompts Bill to embark on a voyeuristic odyssey, in which Bill infiltrates a secret sex society and uncovers what he believes to be a murderous conspiracy.

In Vanilla Sky, the conspiracy that Cruise’s character, David, uncovers is related to his lucid dreamlike state and a company called Life Extension, which places terminally ill patients in a state of cryonic suspension until the patients can be cured. Just as Eyes Wide Shut puts Bill in the position of having to differentiate between reality and his subconscious instincts, David finds himself unable to trust his eyes and thoughts amid the mounting evidence that his world is the product of his imagination.

Bill and David both discover that wish-fulfillment fantasies often have horrific consequences. For David, this relates to cryonic suspension and the realization that the idyllic world that David has inhabited since leaving reality is controlled through his lucid dream state, which increasingly becomes a nightmare for David. While Bill is eventually dissuaded through fear and intimidation from investigating the secret society further, David, after discovering the reality of his existence, decides to pursue immortality in a world in which everyone and everything he loved in his previous life is gone.

Vanilla Sky Has to Be Seen More Than Once

While Vanilla Sky, which grossed more than $200 million at the worldwide box office and became Tom Cruise’s ninth film to cross the $100 million mark at the domestic box office, was a commercial success at the time of its release, it was largely rejected by audiences and critics at the time of its release, ostensibly due to Cruise’s generally unlikable characterization and the film’s complicated plot.

However, these objections to Vanilla Sky tend to fade with multiple viewings, especially when the film is viewed in combination with Open Your Eyes, to which Vanilla Sky feels more like an extension than a remake. What becomes especially apparent on a second viewing of Vanilla Sky is how effectively the performances of Cruise, Penélope Cruz, and Cameron Diaz establish an emotional level of realism, which transcends the film’s surreal elements.

Moreover, like The Matrix film series, Vanilla Sky continues to resonate strongly through its ability to capture the palpable, persistent fear and paranoia that choice and destiny are controlled by a hidden reality in which human beings have unknowingly become the equivalent of a brain in a vat, or a rat in a cage. Vanilla Sky is streaming on Paramount+ and Prime Video.