By Audrey Hall
My son, an enthusiastic fan of classic cinema, once tried to convince my mother to let him watch a movie called Stalker before he went to bed. Being a sensible woman, she refused to allow her eight-year-old grandson to watch a film with such a foreboding title. He tried to explain to her that “stalker” in this context didn’t mean a dangerous and unwanted follower, but instead described a guide through a magical area called the Zone wherein lies a room that grants wishes. My poor mother again refused him as this explanation made little sense and sounded made up on the spot. I don’t blame my mother at all for this. How was she to know this little boy was genuinely describing the premise of a classic Soviet film from 1979? The premise of Stalker, taken from the novel Roadside Picnic, is not the entirety of what makes it unique and uncanny. The way the film is made and how its story unfolds through its characters brought something new and mystifying to the film scene at the time of its release. What remains timeless to this day is the film’s raw and vulnerable pilgrimage into the depths of the human psyche, a reach toward the divine unlike anything we’ve seen since.
Pilgrimage as a concept is at the heart of the film’s premise. In more specific terms, the film follows three travelers into a sentient and surreal landscape known only as the Zone. At the center of the Zone is the Room, wherein one’s deepest desires can become manifest. The Zone itself is treacherous, and those who enter tend to disappear. This is where the “Stalker” comes in, a guide learned in the ways of the Zone who can lead pilgrims to the Room. In this journey, he takes a poet and scientist toward the Room, explaining the fickle, dangerous, and ever-changing nature of the Zone as they go. The film’s conflict lies largely in the dynamics between the three main characters as well as what they each experience internally.
Audience interpretation is simultaneously the film’s greatest strength and most glaring flaw as the production is geared largely toward maintaining ambiguity outside of what’s revealed through dialogue. It achieves this through open air and desolation that’s consistent between what we see and what we hear, and sometimes achieved through a deliberate incongruence of the two. Almost nothing is seen within the Zone that one would consider obviously surreal, save for a voice from nowhere issuing a warning to the poet, and a bird vanishing and reappearing. Both instances are brief but pivotal—sharp reminders to the audience that the Zone is truly as surreal as the Stalker insists. Aside from this, the backdrop of the film is mostly abandoned power plants, oscillating between closed, decrepit rooms and corridors and large, open fields of overgrowth and industrial ruin. The deeper the characters trek into the Zone, the more water becomes prominent, with rooms and open spaces flooded more and more. The sound design and score of Stalker is characterized by minimalism.
The empty space also exists in the film’s notoriously sluggish pacing, between its exceptionally long shots and meticulous lingering on each conversation, monologue, or introspection from the characters. One of the most brilliant and interesting scenes in the film is simultaneously its most boring and least engaging on the surface--a slow montage of each character’s facial expressions as they ride the railcar that enters the Zone with metallic noise of the railcar being all the audience can hear. To some, this film has been a deep source of inspiration and paints one of the most incredible and unique visions of a science fiction reality ever crafted. To others, it’s one of the most banal and dissatisfying films they’ve ever seen.
All this said, the story that unfolds in the mind of the viewer holds depths as varied and rich as there are viewers willing to imagine what’s happening. The film’s story and aesthetics have left an observable imprint on film, music, and many other mediums of art and entertainment, examples including HBO series Westworld as well as films like Annihilation and Chernobyl Diaries.
While obviously there are the abstract and inconceivable portraits of the Zone itself one conjures in place of explicit visual information, there is a deeper and more disarming abstract within the connections formed between the characters as well as the Zone itself. The Zone operates as a device with which each character’s true nature is drawn out in a raw and powerful honesty, each facing themselves on their way to the Room. The wishes granted by the Room are not commands from a person’s mouth, but what lies in the truth of their heart. As the viewer watches these characters experience this disambiguation of their spirit, a step beyond the story itself can be taken, wherein we can turn our empathy toward these characters on ourselves. This onus on the viewer can become a bond to the film not in the interest of being entertained, but as a means of becoming more honest in how we connect (both inwardly and outwardly) with ourselves. The film is an invitation, a mirror granted to each member of the audience with which we can analyze our own motives and biases. There is a call to action to peel away the superficialities within which we hide from others as well as ourselves.
It is in this way I see the divine within the subtle depths of the film. I am a materialist, but I find what others describe as a spiritual connection to other people and the world around me through this process of raw honesty and vulnerability with oneself. The film also deliberately evokes a tone of dualistic spirituality, directly with recitations from the Bible and Tao Te Ching, as well as subtly with the atmosphere and psychological journeys of the characters into this realm of unadulterated truth. The superstitious Stalker speaks fearfully of the Zone’s judgment as the poet soliloquizes about existential dread, famously wearing a faux crown of thorns at one point to hammer home the religious angst felt throughout the film. The pilgrimage of the characters reaches a powerful denouement, both simple and clear as day to the watcher who invests completely in the abstract depths of their difficult path. There is only one enigma left to face: the Room itself.
At this film’s resolution, I felt what so many claim to feel when washed in the blood of the Lamb: a deep cleansing. The tranquility of it was a spiritual height I’d never experienced before, a moment of pure peace in the final cathartic release from the film’s carefully curated suspense. I watched in awe as a gentle rain filled the flooded Room with all three characters sitting outside, having finally reached their destination but choosing not to enter. Having faced the truth within themselves, they surrender their desires. They need no wish granted for they finally understand it holds neither peace nor absolution. Their absolution is their surrender. They have been cleansed by the waters of the Zone.
These spiritual depths may be entirely subjective, or even myopic in terms of the film’s intentions, but that’s the beauty of art like this. No matter what medium an artist works with, the most fundamentally important role art plays in our lives is opening us up to other people.. Stalker takes this a step further with its many avenues toward having a truthful relationship with ourselves and others as well as what lies on the surface in its unique production and storytelling. Our connection to the filmmakers and the audience takes on a multidimensional shape, each parallel reality within each viewer’s psyche explored intimately through the film and its many interpretations. Within my atheistic heart this film has conjured up a connection to something larger than myself, and though I may not recommend it for everyone, I wish that everyone could feel what I have felt in watching it over and over again.
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My son, an enthusiastic fan of classic cinema, once tried to convince my mother to let him watch a movie called Stalker before he went to bed. Being a sensible woman, she refused to allow her eight-year-old grandson to watch a film with such a foreboding title. He tried to explain to her that “stalker” in this context didn’t mean a dangerous and unwanted follower, but instead described a guide through a magical area called the Zone wherein lies a room that grants wishes. My poor mother again refused him as this explanation made little sense and sounded made up on the spot.