#43 (tie): ‘Stalker’: The Reveal discusses all 100 of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time

On December 1st, 2022, Sight & Sound magazine published “The Greatest Films of All Time,” a poll that’s been updated every 10 years since Bicycle Thieves topped the list in 1952. It is the closest thing movies have to a canon, with each edition reflecting the evolving taste of critics and changes in the culture at large. It’s also a nice checklist of essential cinema. Over the course of many weeks, months, and (likely) years, we’re running through the ranked list in reverse order and digging into the films as deep as we can. We hope you will take this journey with us.

Stalker (1979)
Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Ranking: #43 (tie)
Previous ranking: #29 (2012), #41 (1992). 

Premise: In an unnamed country, there’s a mysterious and perilous area called “The Zone” that the government keeps cordoned off from ordinary citizens by penalty of law. Soon after his release from prison for violating this dictate, a guide known as the Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) agrees to lead two men, known only to us (and each other) as the Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and the Professor (Mykola Hrynko), through The Zone, which presents an ever-shifting set of dangers. The fabled prize for passage is a place called “The Room” that grants wishes for anyone fortunate enough to enter it. But in this metaphysical space, it’s hard to know whether the reward is a trap, too. 

Scott: Keith, one of my favorite science fiction films of recent vintage—and I believe one of yours, too—is Alex Garland’s Annihilation, a horror movie (of sorts) in which a group of women venture into a mysterious, verdant forbidden zone called Area X. Throughout their journey, they’re confronted by mutating landscapes that seem to merge organically with their own bodies, which gives you a certain action jolt, but it’s also clear that Area X is its own peculiar entity, one that impacts people psychologically as much as it does physically. It remains astounding to me that Garland was able to round up a big-name cast and get such a puzzling movie made within the studio system—the studio itself, as I recall, seemed to abandon any faith that it would find any admirers at all, much less be a box-office hit—and one big reason is that Annihilation seems as heavily indebted to Stalker as, say, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is to Hitchcock’s Rebecca. It’s one hell of a piece of fan art. 

Personally, it took me a little time to understand why Stalker has received the level of critical adulation that has been sustained by the two other Tarkovsky films on the Sight and Sound 100, Andrei Rublev (which we discussed at #67) and Mirror (which is still to come at #33). Some of the reasons are specific to me: I first encountered Stalker in the early ’90s at my campus movie theater, which had received a print so worn-down and brittle that it snapped multiple times during a single screening. At the time, the film seemed muddy and incomprehensible, but there’s no question that my age, combined with such a disruptive showing, were major factors in coloring my impression of it. When I saw a restored version that toured repertory houses decades later, Stalker completely blew me away. For one, those muddy visuals were now exceptionally vivid, whether you’re looking at the sepia tone in the early scenes or the fog-shrouded ambience of “The Zone” once our trio of adventurers start their tour. The sound design is on another level entirely, providing this eerie undergirding that’s essential to the film’s tone. 

To me, one of the great achievements of Stalker is that Tarkovsky leans so heavily on these cinematic tools to bring the film’s existential mood across. Because, if you think about it, the journey through The Zone doesn’t seem to require much from these men at all. Once the Stalker has led the Writer and the Professor past the military blockade and into this forbidden area, “The Room” isn’t hard to find at all: “Straight ahead, 200 meters,” says the Stalker, adding, “But there are no direct paths.” In terms of conceit and sheer space, there’s a massive difference between Stalker and the other two Tarkovsky films in the Top 100—one a sweeping re-creation of 15th century Russia, the other set aboard a space station. Here, Tarkovsky needs to make a 200-meter distance seem more 20,000. At times, The Room feels like some illusory oasis at the end of the horizon, always close and yet perpetually out of reach. 

They get there, Keith, but as the expression goes, it’s more about the journey than the destination. As the Stalker warns his charges, “the straight path isn’t the shortest,” and whatever traps had been laid for them previously no longer apply. The obstacles are not fixed but placed in response to the poor souls who choose to travel within the Zone, which doesn’t make this landscape a landscape at all, but an ever-mutating and hostile space that’s as much existential as real. One of the critical lines of the film for me is when the Stalker says, of the Room, “I think it lets through those who have lost hope.” (It’s telling that his mentor, another stalker who succeeded at getting to the Room and fulfilled his desire for riches, wound up hanging himself at home a week later.) 

There’s a metaphor here, right Keith? That’s what the interpretive hat on my head keeps on telling me, anyway. But I wonder if you have a guess as to what Tarkovsky is getting at beyond the obvious suggestion that life itself is full of great perils and elusive promises, with perhaps no meaning at the end of it. I’m also curious if you have any guesses over the real-world context for a film like Stalker. My one prevailing thought is that I cannot believe that it was produced before the Chernobyl disaster, because everything about The Zone, with its government restrictions and its crumbling edifices and its unruly growth, suggests the 2,600-square KM “zone of exclusion” that the Russian government put in place after the meltdown.

Keith: Scott, were you aware, because I certainly was not, of the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl? Released in 2007, it’s a first-person shooter inspired by Tarkovsky’s film and its source material, Alex and Boris Stugatsky’s 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, that transplants the action to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. (If you’ve got six hours, you can watch a complete playthrough. Or you could watch Stalker two-and-a-half more times.) I bring it up because a) others have made the same connection between Stalker’s Zone and the aftermath of the real-life Chernobyl catastrophe and b) in its basic outline, Stalker could be a much more straightforward genre film in which stalwart heroes plunge into the unknown to confront the alien invaders.

It’s certainly not that. And, as much as I love this film, I would have a hard time telling anyone unfamiliar with it what exactly it is. That we know the three central characters only by their professions suggests we’re in the realm of allegory, but an allegory for what? And while the Writer and Professor have roles we recognize from our world, the Stalker’s job seems to be unique to the world of Stalker. As for the narrative, it begins like a hero’s journey straight out Joseph Conrad’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, as the trio leave the everyday world for one of “supernatural wonder.” But it’s hard to say they achieve any kind of victory, decisive or otherwise. And instead of returning with a boon, the Stalker seems defeated and more morose than when he set out. Should we consider Tarkovsky’s film a rebuke of this kind of story? 

Yet, for all its images of despair, I don’t think Stalker is cynical and I think that’s part of what makes it so memorable. It might be fruitful to start at the end. The last scene turns the focus to the Stalker’s daughter, whom he calls “Monkey.” Like others her age, she’s been affected by being born in proximity to The Zone. Her physical challenges make this evident but, as the film ends, we see she’s also developed some telekinetic abilities, a revelation accompanied by the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, a celebration of universal brotherhood. After hours of watching men of one generation struggle to reach a destination that ultimately proves to be unfulfilling (or worse), Tarkovsky closes with a girl of the next generation quietly revealing potential for humanity they’d never imagined.

I don’t see any irony here. It feels hopeful to me. And I think there’s hopefulness within the film, too. The Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor argue throughout the journey but ultimately don’t turn on one another, even at the end, when each realizes they’re not going to get what they want from the Room should they enter it. (Or maybe they will, and that will be worse, as Porcupine’s story demonstrates.) If it’s an allegory, it’s an intentionally out-of-focus allegory or one so broad it can only be about the experience of life itself. Yet even though we never learn where the film takes place, it seems grounded in its historical moment. The Zone is filled with detritus that makes it look like where the 20th century went to die.

One of my favorite things about Stalker is the way it makes the Zone feel so unsettling even before our heroes get close to the Room without really adding anything to the eerie locations where Tarkovsky shot the film. It’s just an overgrown field, really, but the combination of the visuals, characters who believe it to be threatening, and Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score makes it feel creepy. But I’m afraid I tossed off “the visuals” way too casually, since so much of this film’s power comes from Tarkovsky’s gift for composition and careful camera movement and the ability to combine those two elements to hypnotic effect. So let me hand it back to you on that note, Scott. What images from this film stick with you? And what do you make of the creeping pace Tarkovsky uses here? It’s not at odds with the style of his other movies, but it does seem more pronounced here than even in a movie like Solaris. What does that choice accomplish?

Scott: The interiors of Stalker are so memorable, aren’t they? First there’s the sepia tone of the Stalker’s home and that starkly appointed bar where he meets the men he’s going to guide  through the Zone. But I’m struck most profoundly by the industrial antechambers the three men encounter as they get closer to the Room. We’re told that they’re approaching this mystical place where their deepest wish is granted but it’s not exactly Edenic, right? It looks more like abandoned wreckage, the remnants of a historical period that may have once included this industrial hub, but it didn’t yield the prosperity that people might have expected. There’s an eerie beauty to it at times—that chamber with the patterned sand dunes, which tends to be the go-to promotional image for the film, is marvelously uncanny—but more often we’re seeing images of decay, with pools of fetid water and dangerous shards of metal and glass. The sound design, which to my mind is the film’s most distinctive element, reinforces the impression that the characters are tooling around a condemned place. 

Stalker is a tough sit, though its atmospherics go a long way towards making it a mesmeric one if you’re in the right headspace for it. Tarkovsky presents us with this hero’s journey, as you say, but we never know where the characters are in relation to the Room or how they’re going to get there, because there’s an untraceable internal logic to it that the audience, like the Writer and the Professor, can never unpack. Some paths lead the three men in a circle, having not gone anywhere at all. (Is Stalker an influence on The Blair Witch Project, too?) Then at one point, the Writer draws the shortest matchstick and has to navigate through a “meat grinder” that reputedly chews up the morally unfit. The overall effect of this strange and seemingly arbitrary journey is to establish this setting as more of a philosophical space. That’s why Stalker and Solaris feels like companion pieces, two science fiction movies that put their characters in a situation where they have to address fundamental questions about life itself. 

In Stalker, the closer these men get to the Room, the more urgent these questions become. It never occurred to me to think about the film as hopeful, Keith, but you make a convincing case. Who among us has not wondered what we would want if we were granted a wish like the Room has to offer? (That it grants your subconscious desire rather than your spoken desire is a fascinating twist I’ll get to in a bit.) It is entirely reasonable to expect the Writer and the Professor to take advantage of this opportunity, but when they’re right on the doorstep, it’s revealed that the Professor intends to blow the place up, blaming the Zone for empowering the corrupt souls who are ruining the country. The Stalker fights and pleads for his job, which he believes helps people who are unhappy like him, but ultimately the journey ends without anyone entering the Room. There’s integrity and selflessness to that decision, and it feels like a cycle has been broken. (Even the stray dog that follows them around gets liberated.)  

What did you make of the story of the “Porcupine,” Keith? I’m reminded a bit of lottery winners who wind up feeling cursed by their newfound wealth—the fine 2010 documentary Lucky chronicles a few of them—but it’s not quite the same, because this isn’t a case of a man who was unsatisfied by having his wish granted. The real issue is that the wish, issued by his subconscious, revealed something about himself that he couldn’t live with. It underlines the fact that the journey in the Stalker is an internal one, and getting to the Room involves reckoning with who you really are and what you actually want, which isn’t like getting to the “X” on a treasure map and digging for gold doubloons. 

As our resident science fiction expert, Keith, I’m curious to know where you might place Stalker among other, more philosophically loaded films of the genre and of the times? And what do you see as its influence? We’re getting to a point on the list now where we’re in rarefied air, and the films tend to be touchstones for other directors. I mentioned Annihilation as a pretty direct descendent of the film, but I’m guessing there are other titles that come to mind? Or even just approaches to science fiction that were opened up by Tarkovsky here?

Keith: By coincidence, I rewatched Jim Jarmusch’s great 2013 vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive over the weekend and found myself making connections to Stalker. Instead of the Zone, Jarmusch’s film draws on the real-life decay of 2010s Detroit, but the crumbling buildings and stagnant pools of water (and other, more toxic substances) feel Stalker-esque. And in some respects so do the characters’ journeys. Tom Hiddleston plays Adam as a character who’s this close to giving up on life, not so much because of his own disappointment but because of the general direction of the world, which seems determined to do itself in despite being able to create profound beauty, like Gibson guitars or the plays of William Shakespe…er, Christopher Marlowe. (Scott, I like this movie so much I can even forgive the Anti-Statfordianism.) Like Stalker’s characters, he doesn’t see much reason to keep going, and that feeling ultimately starts to infect the thinking of his upbeat, curious, optimistic wife Eve (Tilda Swinton). But, like the Stalker characters, in the end they decide to press on anyway.

It’s not like Tarkovsky invented this conceit, but it’s hard not to see the influence of Stalker on other movies that use an external landscape as a stand-in for its characters’ inner landscapes, particularly science fiction films. That’s true of something like Annihilation, but even in a more straightforward film like Aliens, the transformed space colony, with its oozing, threatening, xenomorph-created structures, feels like a manifestation of Ripley’s fears. (Or maybe it’s just that the sand dunes in Stalker remind me of the alien pods.) As to where Stalker fits into the tradition of thoughtful 1970s science fiction, it’s tempting to just see Tarkovsky as sui generis, but he wasn’t alone in seeing the philosophical potential in science fiction. The beginning of the decade is filled with examples of pessimistic films that took the era’s headlines to their darker conclusions, but I think Stalker more closely resembles something like René Laloux’s trippy, animated feature Fantastic Planet, Alain Resnais’ Je T'aime, Je T'aime, or Agnes Varda’s Les Créature, all films that are less interested in the “science” part of “science fiction” than the places their films could go after slipping free of the world we know.

I think you’re onto something with the story of poor Porcupine, whose success becomes a cautionary tale that heavily influences our heroes’ decision not to enter the Room. Porcupine realized his greatest desire and not only did it turn out to be not that great after all, kind of like the lottery winners you reference, but it reflects badly on Porcupine himself. His greatest dream was a selfish one, and he couldn’t live with this realization. That’s one of the most intriguing and disquieting elements of the film. Upon realizing the Room will make them aware of their deepest desires, all choose not to enter. Could you? I think most of us think of ourselves as fundamentally noble people who do the right thing, but what if entering the Room spoiled this illusion? Maybe there are some parts of the soul better left unexplored, and rooms best left unentered.

My deepest desire? You guessed it: to watch more movies on Sight & Sound’s greatest movies list. And we’ve got a towering, post-war classic up next, nothing less than one of the most influential movies ever. And that description fits either of the films tied at the 41st spot: Bicycle Thieves and Rashomon. We’ll flip a coin and… heads! It’s De Sica!

Previously:

#95 (tie): Get Out
#95 (tie): The General
#95 (tie): Black Girl
#95 (tie): Tropical Malady
#95 (tie): Once Upon a Time in the West
#95 (tie): A Man Escaped
#90 (tie): Yi Yi
#90 (tie): Ugetsu
#90 (tie): The Earrings of Madame De…
#90 (tie): Parasite
#90 (tie): The Leopard
#88 (tie): The Shining
#88 (tie): Chungking Express
#85 (tie): Pierrot le Fou
#85 (tie): Blue Velvet
#85 (tie): The Spirit of the Beehive
#78 (tie): Histoire(s) du Cinéma
#78 (tie): A Matter of Life and Death
#78 (tie): Celine and Julie Go Boating
#78 (tie): Modern Times
#78 (tie): A Brighter Summer Day
#78 (tie): Sunset Boulevard
#78 (tie): Sátántangó
#75 (tie): Imitation of Life
#75 (tie): Spirited Away
#75 (tie): Sansho the Bailiff
#72 (tie): L’Avventura
#72 (tie): My Neighbor Totoro
#72 (tie): Journey to Italy
#67 (tie): Andrei Rublev
#67 (tie): The Gleaners and I
#67 (tie): The Red Shoes
#67 (tie): Metropolis
#67 (tie): La Jetée
#66: Touki Bouki
#63 (tie): The Third Man
#63 (tie): Goodfellas
#63 (tie): Casablanca
#60 (tie): Moonlight
#60 (tie): La Dolce Vita
#60 (tie): Daughters of the Dust
#59: Sans Soleil
#54 (tie): The Apartment
#54 (tie): Battleship Potemkin
#54 (tie): Blade Runner
#54 (tie): Sherlock Jr.
#52 (tie): Contempt
#52 (tie): Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
#50 (tie): The Piano
#50 (tie): The 400 Blows
#48 (tie): Wanda
#48 (tie): Ordet
#45 (tie): North by Northwest
#45 (tie): The Battle of Algiers
#45 (tie): Barry Lyndon
#43 (tie): Killer of Sheep