Best Ever
Science Fiction Movie?

Three men walk into a forbidden zone. They walk for two and a half hours. They reach a room where, allegedly, your deepest wish comes true. They don’t go in. They walk back out. That’s Stalker. That’s the whole plot. And yet this is one of the most unsettling, most profound, most genuinely science fictional films ever made — not despite its refusal of spectacle, but because of it.

The Zone is Tarkovsky’s masterpiece of negative space. Something happened here, we’re told — a meteorite, maybe, or something stranger. The government sealed it off. The laws of physics don’t apply. Except we never see anything explicitly supernatural. The camera shows us rusted metal, pools of water, overgrown ruins. The strangeness is in the atmosphere, in the way the Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) navigates by throwing weighted bandages ahead of him, in the way paths that seem straight somehow loop back. The Zone is dangerous because the film tells us it’s dangerous. We take it on faith.

The three characters are archetypes, literally named by function: the Stalker, who guides people through the Zone; the Writer, who seeks inspiration; the Professor, who seeks knowledge. They argue philosophy while wading through flooded tunnels. They debate whether the Room can truly grant wishes, whether wanting something and wanting to want something are the same, whether humanity deserves its desires. Tarkovsky wasn’t interested in plot. He was interested in questions that have no answers.

The cinematography by Alexander Knyazhinsky (and, after the first version was ruined in processing, by Georgy Rerberg and then Leonid Kalashnikov) is extraordinary. The film begins in sepia-toned bleakness — the Stalker’s apartment, the industrial wasteland around the Zone — then shifts to color as they enter. But the Zone’s color is muted, green-brown, more melancholy than magical. Tarkovsky used the shift not to signal wonder but to signal otherness. This is a different world. The difference is subtle and total.

The long takes are famous, or infamous. Tarkovsky holds shots for minutes at a time, the camera drifting over objects — a syringe, a gun, coins in a puddle — while the soundtrack hums with electronic drones and distant trains. Nothing happens, and everything happens. You’re forced into a meditative state, whether you want it or not. This is cinema as spiritual exercise.

The Room itself is the film’s great refusal. The men reach it. They sit outside. The Writer refuses to enter because he’s afraid of what he truly wants. The Professor reveals he brought a bomb, planning to destroy the Room, then decides not to. The Stalker weeps because no one believes anymore, because the Zone is sacred and the world has no room for the sacred. They leave. We never see the Room grant anything.

Tarkovsky said he wanted to make a film about the existence of the soul. He succeeded, not by proving the soul exists but by creating a space where the question becomes unbearable. The Zone is faith without evidence, hope without confirmation. You either enter or you don’t. The consequences are your own.

The final shot — the Stalker’s daughter, born deformed because of his exposure to the Zone, moving glasses with her mind while a train shakes the house — is the film’s only unambiguous miracle. Or maybe she’s just pushing them. Tarkovsky doesn’t clarify. He never clarifies. That’s the point.

The Zone is waiting.

Andrei Tarkovsky: The Best Ever is faith as landscape. Is Stalker the Best Ever Science Fiction Movie? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Criterion Blu-ray is the definitive English-language release with a new 2K restoration.
• The Artificial Eye UK release offers an alternate transfer with different color grading.
• The Russian Cinema Council 4K restoration is the newest and most detailed.