10 / 10
Stalker is two and a half hours of three men walking through wet grass and ruined buildings. Almost nothing happens and I can’t stop thinking about it.
Andrei Tarkovsky directed it in 1979, from the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic. It’s a 10, and it asks more patience than almost any film I’ve rated that high.
The Premise
Somewhere in an unnamed country is the Zone, an area where something happened, cordoned off by soldiers. Inside it, people say, is a room that grants your deepest wish. A Stalker earns his living guiding people in illegally. This time he’s taking a Writer, who has lost faith in his work, and a Professor, who is carrying something in his rucksack he hasn’t mentioned.
The Zone
The Zone looks like nothing. Grass, water, abandoned machinery, a tunnel. Its danger is entirely in the Stalker’s behaviour: he won’t walk straight, he throws nuts tied to cloth ahead of him to test a path, and he insists the Zone changes if you disrespect it. Tarkovsky never shows anything supernatural. You believe it because he does.
The Room
They reach the threshold, and the film turns into an argument about whether anyone should go in. The Stalker tells the story of a man called Porcupine, who went into the room to save his brother and came out rich, and hanged himself, because the room gives you what you really want and not what you think you want. None of them goes in.
The Production
The first version was shot and the film stock was ruined in processing, so Tarkovsky shot it all again. Much of it was filmed near a chemical plant in Estonia, downstream of industrial waste, and several people who worked on it, including Tarkovsky, his wife and the actor Anatoly Solonitsyn, later died of cancer. The crew have argued for decades about whether the location caused it.
The Ending
The Stalker’s daughter, who cannot walk, sits at a table and looks at three glasses, and one of them moves. A train goes past. The film doesn’t explain it and doesn’t need to.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Stalker makes its danger invisible and lets a character’s fear create it. We never see the Zone do anything, and we’re afraid of it because the Stalker is.
The reader will believe in a threat they never see if a character they trust behaves as though it’s there.
Is Stalker as good as people say?
Yes. It’s a 10, and it’s very slow. Watch it at night, without distractions, and let it work. It’s unlike anything else.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists