Stalker

Dir Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia 1979 Criterion, £17.99 (Blu-ray)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is justly renowned as one of the greatest science-fiction films of all time and, in this humble reviewer’s opinion, is one of the greatest films of all time in any genre. To describe it merely as scifi seems to me to be missing the point somewhat. Its SF credentials are certainly impeccable, based as it is on Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s 1972 novel Roadside

Picnic – itself a seminal work in the genre – but Tarkovsky is even less interested in aliens than the Strugatskys are. He jettisons most of the plot points from the novel and instead uses the basic premise as a framework for an exploration of metaphysical themes.

The stalker of the title is a hired guide, one who leads those brave or foolhardy enough on trips through the Zone – a part of the country turned into a lethal wasteland as a result of an alien visitation. The reason travellers wish to enter the Zone is because there is reputed to be at its heart a room where one’s most innermost desire can be granted. Two such travellers, a writer and a professor (Tarkovsky regulars Anatoly Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko, respectively), have hired a stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) to take them there. And that’s pretty much it as far as plot is concerned: the film is a literal and metaphorical journey.

Its greatness lies in its uniqueness. More than any other director, with the possible exception of Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky used film as a means to consider philosophical questions; his films have a depth and profundity unsurpassed in cinema history. In Stalker he examines concepts such as religion, conscious and unconscious desire, and 20th century anxiety with the ultimate purpose of laying bare the human condition.

I’m aware that all this makes the film sound very dry, but the remarkable thing is that Tarkovsky succeeds in his goal while delivering it in the form of a tense and gripping cinematic experience. On top of that, Tarkovsky was – within Soviet budgetary restrictions – an absolute master of technique and composition, so the film has an epic feel to it, which, in a different context, would rival someone like David Lean. To have

Stalker available on Blu-ray in the UK is cause for celebration, and even more so because it has been issued as part of the Criterion Collection’s UK collection. The film has never looked better (seen here in a new 2K digital restoration) and comes complete with some extremely interesting and illuminating supplements, as you’d expect from Criterion.