Stalker (Russian: Сталкер, IPA: [ˈstaɫkʲer]) is a 1979 Soviet science fiction art drama film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky with a screenplay written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, loosely based on their 1972 novel Roadside Picnic. The film combines elements of science fiction with dramatic philosophical and psychological themes.
The film tells the story of an expedition led by a figure known as the "Stalker" (Alexander Kaidanovsky), who takes his two clients—a melancholic writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) seeking inspiration, and a professor (Nikolai Grinko) seeking scientific discovery—to a mysterious restricted site known simply as the "Zone", where there supposedly exists a room which grants a person's innermost desires.
Stalker was released on Goskino in May 1979. Upon release, the film garnered mixed reviews, but in subsequent years it has been recognized as a classic of world cinema, with the British Film Institute ranking it #29 on its list of the "50 Greatest Films of All Time".[6] The film sold over 4 million tickets, mostly in the Soviet Union, against a budget of 1 million Soviet rubles...
Recently restored, Andrei Tarkovsky's science-fiction masterpiece is "as necessary to the cinema as Mozart to music" (Gavin Millar, The Listener). Three men — the Writer, the Professor, and the Stalker — travel from a post-apocalyptic landscape into "The Zone," an area which the government declared off limits after a mysterious extraterrestrial event rendered it supposedly uninhabitable. Guided by the severe, shaven Stalker, the men navigate a treacherous landscape of shifting, invisible "traps," industrial debris, and subterranean passages to the threshold of the mysterious, wish-fulfilling room at the Zone's centre, which reveals (and, perhaps, materializes) one's deepest desires. Tarkovsky rarely achieved such an intense rendering of spiritual quest: the Christ imagery and intimations of Dante, the voluptuous sense of ruin, decay, and imminent catastrophe, the painterly references to Bosch, Rembrandt, and Flemish art, and the temps morts of dripping water, billowing fog, and slow wind all combine to make Stalker one of his most beautiful and mesmerizing films.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a professor into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one’s most deeply held desires. Adapting a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky created an immersive world with a wealth of material detail and a sense of organic atmosphere. A religious allegory, a reflection of contemporaneous political anxieties, a meditation on film itself—Stalker envelops the viewer by opening up a multitude of possible meanings.
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