10 / 10
Official trailer
Into the Zone
Somewhere in an unnamed, ruined country, there’s an area called the Zone, a stretch of overgrown fields, flooded buildings and rusting machinery sealed off by the military after something strange happened there. Nobody knows exactly what. Inside, somewhere deep in the Zone, is a room that’s said to grant the deepest wish of anybody who enters it.
The Stalker is a guide, one of the few people who know how to get through the Zone alive. He’s hired by two men, known only as the Writer and the Professor, and he smuggles them past the guards, under gunfire, onto a railway handcar, and into the Zone. Then they start walking.
Andrei Tarkovsky made Stalker in 1979, loosely adapting Roadside Picnic, a science-fiction novel by the Soviet brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It ranks with the greatest films of its century, and it asks more patience than almost any film ever made.
Stalker asks more of me than almost any film I’d call a favorite, and nothing else I love gives back quite so much. I’d give it the 10 for the look of the Zone alone, before the Room ever comes into it. My only complaint is that the sepia opening in the town tests even my patience, and it’s a small one.
Sepia and Colour
The opening scenes, in the grim town outside the Zone, are shot in a murky, brownish sepia. The Stalker’s home is a squalid little room, his wife is desperate, and his daughter, Monkey, is disabled. The world outside the Zone is grey, rotten and hopeless.
When the three men reach the Zone, the film shifts into color: lush green fields, grey water, moss, mist and rain. Cinema has few moments this beautiful, and the shift tells you how the Stalker sees the Zone. For him, it’s the only place in the world that’s alive. I think that cut into green is the most beautiful transition Tarkovsky ever put on film. It tells me more about the Stalker than any line of dialogue could, and it makes the drab town behind him feel like a prison.
For Writers
The film shifts from sepia to color when the men enter the Zone. The change in palette tells the audience how the Stalker sees the world without a word of explanation.
Changing the look or feel of your prose when a character enters a new world can signal a shift in perception more powerfully than any description of their feelings could manage.
If your character moves between two worlds, find a way to make them feel different on the page: sentence length, sensory detail, color, rhythm. Let the reader feel the shift before they understand it. Tarkovsky never explains the color. He trusts the audience to feel what the Stalker feels.
Slow
Stalker is slow. There’s no way around it. Shots last for minutes. The three men walk, stop, argue, sit and walk again. The Stalker throws nuts tied with strips of cloth ahead of them to test the path, because the Zone is full of invisible traps that shift and change, and the direct route is always the deadliest.
Nothing dramatic seems to happen, and the tension is unbearable. The Zone might kill them at any moment. Nobody can see how. Tarkovsky makes you feel the danger in a patch of grass, a puddle, a dark tunnel, simply by holding the camera there and letting you wait.
The thrown nuts are my favorite thing in the film. A man tossing bits of metal tied with cloth into the grass to see whether the ground will kill him is the whole film’s method in one gesture, and I could watch Kaidanovsky do it for another hour. Some viewers find it boring, and they’re not wrong about the pace. For those who give in to it, the slowness becomes hypnotic, almost meditative, and the film gets under your skin in a way faster films can’t.
For Writers
The slow pace and long takes make the audience feel the danger in ordinary things: grass, water, a doorway. Tension comes from waiting.
Try slowing down your most tense scene. Linger on details, stretch the moment, delay the payoff for as long as you dare. Done well, the waiting becomes the suspense, and the reader grips the page harder with every line where nothing happens.
Suspense doesn’t need action. A long, quiet scene where danger might strike at any moment can be more nerve-racking than a chase, because the reader’s body stays braced the whole time. The reader’s imagination fills the silence with threats, and imagined threats are always worse than the ones on the page. For more, see my article on pacing.
Three Men
Alexander Kaidanovsky plays the Stalker, a thin, haunted man with a shaved head who believes in the Zone with an almost religious devotion. He’s fragile, anxious and completely serious about the Room. Anatoly Solonitsyn plays the Writer, a cynical, drunk, self-loathing author who wants inspiration and doesn’t believe in anything. Nikolai Grinko plays the Professor, a quiet, precise scientist with a secret purpose.
Most of the film is their conversations, long, rambling, philosophical arguments about faith, art, science and what people really want. The Writer mocks everything. The Professor keeps his thoughts to himself. The Stalker pleads with them to take the Zone seriously. It’s more like a play than a thriller, and it’s absorbing.
The Room
When they finally reach the threshold of the Room, the film turns its central question on its head. The Stalker tells the story of a previous guide, called Porcupine, who went into the Room to wish for his brother’s life and came out rich instead, because the Room grants what you want, whatever you think you want. Porcupine came to a bad end.
The Writer realizes he’s terrified of what the Room might reveal about him. The Professor reveals he’s brought a bomb to destroy it, so no villain can ever use it.
Standing at the threshold, none of the three men goes in. They argue, they sit in the rain, and in the end they turn back.
Few scenes in cinema go this deep, and this is the stretch that justifies the 10 for me. What the Room does matters less to me than the question it forces: could any of us bear to know what we really want? Watching these three men sit in the rain, I don’t have a comfortable answer either.
For Writers
The three men reach the Room and none of them goes in. The climax is a refusal, and it turns the story’s central question inward.
A climax doesn’t always need a character to act, however much convention says it should. Sometimes the most powerful choice isn’t to act, and the reason for that refusal reveals more about the character than any action could. Tarkovsky builds the whole film toward a threshold nobody crosses, and the refusal hits harder than any wish could have. What the men fear finding in the Room tells us everything about who they are, and it leaves the reader asking the same question of themselves.
Faith
Stalker can be read as a religious film, and Tarkovsky, a deeply spiritual director working in the officially atheist Soviet Union, clearly meant it that way.
The Stalker is a kind of holy fool, a believer surrounded by cynics, trying to lead them to something sacred they can’t believe in. The Zone is a place of pilgrimage. The Room is a kind of temple.
Tarkovsky never preaches. It never says whether the Room works or the Zone is magic. It just shows a man whose faith is the only thing keeping him alive, and two men who’ve lost theirs, and it asks which of them is better off. The Stalker’s quiet despair, when he realizes his clients will never believe, is heartbreaking.
Monkey
The film’s final scenes return to the Stalker’s home. His wife speaks directly to the camera, about why she stayed with a man everybody told her would bring her only grief. Her speech, simple and loving, moves as much as anything in the film, a kind of faith of her own.
Then, in the last shot, Monkey sits alone at a table, and three glasses slide across it, one by one, apparently moved by her mind, as a train rumbles past and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy rises faintly on the soundtrack. Is it a miracle, a mutation from the Zone or something else? Tarkovsky leaves it open, and he’s right to. That last image gives me chills, and I wouldn’t trade the mystery for any answer he could have filmed.
Making It
The production was troubled. Tarkovsky shot much of the film once, and the footage was ruined in the laboratory. He reshot it, rewriting the script along the way and replacing his cinematographer. The film took years to finish.
Some of it was shot near abandoned industrial sites and a chemical plant in Estonia, and several members of the crew, including Tarkovsky himself and Solonitsyn, later died of cancer. Some people who worked on the film came to believe the location had poisoned them. It’s impossible to know, and it adds a grim, haunting shadow to the film’s legend.
Science Fiction Without Effects
As science fiction goes, Stalker has almost no special effects. There are no aliens, spaceships or monsters. The Zone looks like an overgrown industrial wasteland, because that’s what it is. The strangeness comes entirely from mood, sound and suggestion.
Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score and the film’s sound design, full of dripping water, distant trains and eerie hums, make the Zone feel alive and watchful. It’s proof that science fiction can be about ideas and atmosphere as much as spectacle, and it’s influenced countless films and video games since.
Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky made only seven feature films, and nearly every one is considered a masterpiece. Before Stalker, he’d made Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris and Mirror, and he’d spent years fighting Soviet censors who distrusted his spiritual themes and his refusal to make simple, obvious films.
Stalker was the last film he made in the Soviet Union. He left for the West soon after, made Nostalghia in Italy and The Sacrifice in Sweden, and died in Paris in 1986, still in exile. Watching Stalker, it’s hard not to see the Stalker himself as a portrait of an artist like Tarkovsky: a believer in a world that has stopped believing, guiding people toward something sacred they don’t want to see.
Its Long Shadow
Stalker’s influence reaches far beyond art cinema. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game series borrowed its title, its Zone and its atmosphere, and set its own version near Chernobyl. Alex Garland’s Annihilation, with its expedition into a strange, shifting area, owes it an obvious debt. Countless films and games since have imagined forbidden zones where the rules of reality bend.
None of them match the original’s stillness. They take the idea and add monsters and gunfights. Tarkovsky’s Zone has no monsters at all. The danger is invisible, and that’s what makes it frightening.
A Warning
Nearly three hours long and very slow, Stalker asks a great deal of its audience. Viewers used to fast-paced films will find it frustrating, and some will find it unbearable. It rewards patience, and it doesn’t forgive impatience. For those willing to meet it halfway, it’s a masterpiece: beautiful, mysterious, deep and completely unique.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Stalker builds a whole film around a journey to a goal that nobody reaches. The destination matters less than what the travelers reveal about themselves along the way, and the refusal at the end becomes the story’s meaning.
A quest story can be most powerful when the quest itself becomes the test of character, and the prize becomes a mirror.
If your characters are seeking something, ask what they’d find out about themselves if they got it. Consider whether the fear of that discovery is what the story is really about.
The Room Nobody Enters
I give Stalker a 10, and it’s the easiest 10 I can give a film this hard to sit through. It’s slow, strange and hypnotic, a science-fiction film with no effects that turns into a meditation on faith and desire, and the Zone looks better than almost anything I’ve seen on a screen. It asks for patience, and I think every minute of that patience comes back to you.
