Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers' novel. Three men walk into the Zone. The most-influential European science-fiction film ever made.
An unnamed industrialised country, at some point in the indeterminate future. A meteorite (or extraterrestrial visitation) has produced a phenomenon called the Zone — an area of unstable physics that the government has cordoned off with armed checkpoints. Within the Zone is a Room that allegedly grants the deepest wishes of anyone who enters it.
A 'Stalker' (a guide who has illegally traversed the Zone before) leads two clients — a Writer and a Professor — into the Zone. The journey takes approximately a day. The Zone's physics requires the Stalker to throw weighted bolts ahead of the party to detect changes in the local physical laws. The film's third act is the Stalker, Writer, and Professor standing outside the Room itself, unable to enter, debating whether they actually want what entering would reveal. The film closes with the Stalker returning home, weeping at his disappointment with his clients, and with a final shot of his daughter — apparently disabled and possibly telekinetic — moving glasses across a table.
Stalker was, by Soviet standards, Tarkovsky's most-commercially-successful film. The 1979 release earned approximately 4 million tickets in Soviet cinemas. The film's international reputation has grown progressively since; it is, by current critical consensus, one of the two or three greatest science-fiction films ever made. The Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll placed it at #43 in its top-100 ranking.
What separates Stalker from conventional science fiction is the absence of conventional science-fiction iconography. There are no spaceships, no aliens, no future technology. The Zone is a landscape of overgrown industrial ruins; the Stalker, Writer, and Professor wear period-contemporary 1970s Soviet clothing. The film's science-fiction premise is purely conceptual — the audience accepts that the Zone has different physical laws because the characters take it seriously. Tarkovsky's argument is that genuine science-fiction is about ideas rather than imagery.
Stalker's production is one of the most-difficult in film history. The original footage shot in northern Estonia in 1977 was, on processing, discovered to be unusable — the lab had improperly processed the entire negative. Tarkovsky reshot most of the film with replacement footage. The reshoot stretched across roughly two years and led to significant tensions among the production team.
Several members of the production crew, including the cinematographer Georgi Rerberg and Tarkovsky himself, were exposed to industrial chemical contamination at the shooting locations near a hydroelectric power station outside Tallinn. The exposure has been credibly linked to subsequent illnesses. Tarkovsky himself died of lung cancer in 1986; several other crew members died of cancer in the following decades. The film's specific reputation as the work that 'killed Tarkovsky' is not entirely speculative.
Stalker's average shot length is approximately 50 seconds — significantly longer than mainstream cinema of any period. The film's opening sequence, a five-minute slow camera move through the Stalker's apartment as he prepares to leave for the Zone, is structurally one of the most-discussed openings in European art cinema. The long-take grammar continues throughout: the train trip into the Zone, the conversations between the three characters, the climactic confrontation outside the Room.
What the long takes do is force the audience to share the characters' temporal experience. The Zone is a slow place; the Stalker's relationship to it is one of patience and deliberation. The film's pacing is, in some sense, its argument — the audience must learn to inhabit the rhythm Tarkovsky imposes, and the inhabitation is the substance of what the film offers. The slow-cinema tradition that has shaped contemporary directors from Apichatpong Weerasethakul to Denis Villeneuve to Park Chan-wook is downstream of Stalker.