Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #19
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #29 (tied with Shoah)

Between Andrei Rublev and now Stalker, my primary impression of Andrei Tarkovsky as a director is that he’s a methodical man, a guy who likes to let both his shots and ideas linger for the viewer, letting the larger ramifications of what he’s depicting on-screen sink in for the audience and leave them with plenty to ponder once the entire motion picture is finished playing. This slow-burn approach sometimes left me a bit cold in Stalker (though that should be taken less as a major critique of the movie and more on me being sometimes unresponsive to certain slower pieces of storytelling), but there’s no denying Tarkovsky has an incredibly evocative way of creating cinema that’s both bold and intriguing.

There are places us human beings are not meant to travel, areas that are not supposed to be seen us mere mortals. But our innate desire to travel to parts unknown for the purpose of conquest is one we have never been able to shake as a species to the point that it was the main motivator for some of the biggest countries on the planet to engage in a race on who would get to outer space first in the 1960’s. That kind of inclination for going to the unknown is one of the reasons three men travel into a forbidden area called The Zone, a place heavily guarded by military personnel and containing some grisly secrets of its own.

The three who travel into the zone are The Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky), The Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) and The Professor (Nikolai Grinko) and their individual personalities and secrets collide under the stressful circumstances one finds themselves in when they go into The Zone. Once the trio arrive into this challenging terrain, Stalker becomes fully colorized whereas prior sequences had been depicted in this brown-ish hue that visually seemed to look like the color ancient pieces of paper have. It looked utterly fascinating to me, like no other color I’d seen in a movie before and does a great job of setting the stage for a unique aesthetic for the entire feature just by this color choice.

Once typical colorized imagery enters the proceedings, splendid imagery continues to be utilized, though here in The Zone the visuals are used to create an appropriately haunting atmosphere. The various decrepit areas look like they’ve been to Hell and back, all of these ruined rooms, vehicles and interior locations come across as being genuinely ravaged by elements we can’t even comprehend, there isn’t an artificial note to be found in these sets depicting the ruined remains of The Zone. The effectiveness of these sets adds another layer of spookiness to the movie by making it startling just to see living breathing human beings interact with such ruined surroundings, they stand out like a sore thumb in a way that truly benefits the atmosphere Stalker is trying to convey.

The lack of background sounds (like cars going by, animal noises, etc.) in these extended sequences of the lead trio trekking across The Zone also adds considerably to its nerve-wracking aesthetic as the emptiness of this domain reinforces how something living like these men really doesn’t belong here. Each of those men are performed admirably by a trio of actors who not only do well in performing their individual actors they also bounce off each other well and play the gradually deteriorating trust amongst the various members of the group in a way that feels as unpredictable as the quarantined area the three of them are trying to navigate.

My personal favorite of the bunch may be Alexander Kaidanovsky as the titular Stalker, especially in one of his final scenes in which he breaks down about his entire existence. Kaidanovsky does such a great job at creating real pain in the way he delivers his dialogue here, you fully get the sense of years of hardship and failure finally being vocalized in this sequence. It’s a pretty devastating moment and Stalker is a similarly shattering movie all about the places, both physical and mentally, man was not meant to travel down. Those places are the ones Stalker deftly explore with such thought-provoking success.