Review #5: 'Stalker' (1979)

Stalker begins in a black and white, industrialised, gated and despotic world. You feel the dampness permeated within the walls. Pools of water lay in mud; it falls from the walls and ceilings. This is the environment that we meet the main character ‘Stalker’ (played laconically by Aleksandr Kaidanovsky). His job is to guide people to their hopes and dreams. The place that he guides them through is ‘The Zone’. The zone is the perfect juxtaposition of the dank world we are first introduced to. A place occupied by the elements of nature. However, this space is unpredictable.

As the story goes, the zone is cordoned off to the masses as there was an unspecified ‘alien’ landing which, at its centre can give the answers – both philosophically and ideologically – to whomever reaches that core. Stalker is employed by people who want to find this out, as a guide through the treacherous landscape. They need a guide who knows how to manoeuvre through it as the land constantly changes, and can be utterly deadly. A writer (Anatoli Solonitsym) and a scientist (Nikolai Grinko), employ ‘Stalker’ as their guide through the terrain.

This is without question my favourite of all Andrei Tarkovsky films (easily beating Mirror (1975) and the more well known Solaris (1972)). There is always a particular beauty with which he is able to film nature, and to transcend the normality of it, and present it as pure imagistic poetry. In the opening sequences, he conjures beauty from damp, decaying environments, and offers the most perfect of juxtapositions of our industrialised world, next to the beauty of nature. But in this filmic world, the natural elements seem to be the enemy; the alien ‘other’.

The answers which the characters are looking for become almost irrelevant, as the sheer poetry of the filmmaking transcends story. I just implore you all to watch this film, which I have to say, is one of my favourite films of all time.


Directed by: Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring: Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko
Country: West Germany/Soviet Union

Rating: *****

Marc Ivamy