Stalker () is a 1979 Soviet post-apocalyptic drama film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky with a screenplay written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, loosely based on their 1972 novel Roadside Picnic. The film tells the story of an expedition led by a figure known as the "Stalker" (Alexander Kaidanovsky), who guides his two clients—a melancholic writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and a professor (Nikolai Grinko)—through a hazardous wasteland to a mysterious restricted site known simply as the "Zone", where supposedly exists a room which grants a person's innermost desires. The film combines elements of science fiction and fantasy with dramatic, philosophical, and psychological themes.
The film was shot over a year on film stock that was later discovered to be unusable and had to be almost entirely reshot with a new cinematographer, Alexander Knyazhinsky. Stalker was released by Goskino in May 1979. Upon release, the film garnered praise in the Soviet and Warsaw Pact press, but only mixed reviews in the West. In later years it was recognised as one of the greatest films of all time. In the decennial critics' and directors' polls published by the British Film Institute's magazine Sight and Sound in 2022, Stalker placed 43rd and 14th, respectively. The film sold over 4 million tickets, mostly in the Soviet Union, against a budget of 1 million roubles.
Plot "The Zone" is a huge tract of open land where the normal laws of physics supposedly do not apply, containing supernatural hazards. At the heart of the Zone lies a "Room" that is said to grant the wishes of anyone who steps inside. The government has fenced off the Zone, subjecting "Stalkers", people who illegally guide others through the Zone, to harsh prison time if caught crossing the border.
One Stalker has just returned from a long prison sentence to his wife and daughter. To his wife's horror, a disaffected writer and a physics professor immediately hire the Stalker to take them through the Zone. Needing the money, he meets the Writer and Professor in a rundown bar-café, warning them that they must do what he says to survive the dangers that lie ahead. He explains that the Zone is a living thing that visitors must respect.
The trio evades the Zone's military guards by following a train through the gate, riding through the Zone's vast wilderness on a railway work car. The Zone contains such human remnants as old abandoned industrial facilities, corpses, guns, and tanks. The Stalker cautiously tests for anomalies as they painstakingly make their way toward the Room, though nothing unusual occurs.
The three men discuss their reasons for wanting to visit the Room as they travel: the Writer fears losing his inspiration, the calm Professor hopes to analyze the Zone in order to win a Nobel Prize, and the Stalker insists he has no motive beyond the altruistic aim of aiding the desperate to their desires. He mentions that his mentor, another Stalker named "Porcupine", obtained great riches by entering the Room but then hanged himself when he returned home.
The trio draw lots to determine that the Writer will go first through an especially long, dark, ominous passageway that the Stalker calls the "meat grinder". Nervously, the Writer passes through without harm, shocking the Stalker, who reveals that the meat grinder kills anyone the Zone deems morally unworthy. The Writer forges ahead and delivers a soliloquy directly to camera about the futility of knowledge and feeling overwhelmed and criticized by other people. He returns to the others, and the Stalker reveals that Porcupine sent a brother ahead of him into the meat grinder, where the brother was killed. The Stalker then recites a poem about never being satisfied, and the Writer rages at the Stalker for assuming he was morally unworthy.
Suddenly, a phone in the antechamber rings. The surprised Professor uses it to call an old enemy scientist, gloating about finding the Room. As the trio prepare to enter the Room, the Professor reveals his true intentions: he has brought a 20-kiloton bomb in his backpack to destroy the Room and therefore prevent evil men from abusing it for gain. He blames the Room, the Stalkers, and their clients for the recent rise of crime, political strife, and destructive science. After a brief scuffle over the bomb, the Stalker weeps, claiming that only the Room has given him meaning in his otherwise pitiful life and that it is the last beacon of hope for humanity.
The Writer deduces that the Stalker's mentor Porcupine hanged himself because of the guilt the Room caused him when it presented him with riches rather than the return of his deceased brother, showing that Porcupine subconsciously cared more about wealth than love. Thus, the Room's ability to grant one's deepest and most secret desire additionally provides a window into the morality of one's soul. The Writer suggests that it is impossible to use the Room for selfish reasons because nobody can know their deepest subconscious desires. The Professor's fears soothed, he dismantles the bomb. The three men sit just outside the Room in silence; none attempt to enter it.
The Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor are met back outside the Zone at the bar-café by the Stalker's wife and daughter. The Stalker returns home in total distress, lamenting to his wife how humanity has lost its capacity for faith, which is needed to traverse the Zone and live a good life. As the Stalker sleeps, his wife contemplates their relationship in a soliloquy delivered to the camera. She says that she would prefer an interesting life of hardship over an easy, boring one. The couple's daughter sits alone, while a love poem by Fyodor Tyutchev is recited through voice-over. The girl appears to use psychokinesis to push three drinking glasses across the table, a train shakes the room as it passes by, and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" is heard.
Cast Alexander Kaidanovsky as the Stalker Anatoly Solonitsyn as the Writer Alisa Freindlich as the Stalker's wife Nikolai Grinko as the Professor Natasha Abramova as Martyshka, the Stalker's daughter Faime Jurno as the Writer's companion Evgeny Kostin as Lyuger, owner of the bar-café (credited as E. Kostin) Raimo Rendi as the patrolman
Title The meaning of the word "stalker" was derived from its use by the Strugatsky brothers in their novel Roadside Picnic, upon which the movie is based. In Roadside Picnic, "Stalker" was a common nickname for men engaged in the illegal enterprise of prospecting for and smuggling alien artefacts out of the "Zone". According to Boris Strugatsky, "prospectors" and "trappers" were potential word choices before "stalker" was decided on, which was at least partially inspired by Rudyard Kipling's character "Stalky" in his Stalky & Co. stories, of which both authors were fans. Their calque of the English word into Russian is pronounced slightly differently, and it came into common usage in Russian after being "coined" by the authors. Tarkovsky also wrote of the English word, "Stalker is from the word 'to stalk'—to creep" in a 1976 diary entry. In the film, a "stalker" is a professional guide to the Zone, someone having the ability and desire to cross the border into the dangerous and forbidden place for a reason.
Themes and interpretations In a review in Slant Magazine, the critic, Nick Schager, describes the film as a "dense, complex, often-contradictory, and endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness, the necessity for faith in an increasingly secular, rational world, and the ugly, unpleasant dreams and desires that reside in the hearts of men", while conceding that the obliqueness of the imagery renders definitive interpretation "both pointless... [and] somewhat futile".
Several critics have identified the nature of human desire as the theme of the film. James Berardinelli interprets the film as suggesting that "one's innermost desire may not be what one thinks it is and that one may be better off not achieving it", while Schager describes the film as capturing "the essence of what man is made of... a yearning for something that's simultaneously beyond our reach and yet intrinsic to every one of us".
Geoff Dyer argues the Stalker is "seeking asylum from the world", and says that "while the film may not be about the gulag, it is haunted by memories of the camps, from the overlap of vocabulary ("Zona", "the meat grinder") to the Stalker's Zek-style shaved head".
Writer Lilya Kaganovsky compares the film's mysterious Zone with the Chernobyl exclusion zone that was established in 1986 (seven years after the release of the film) in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, and some of the people employed to take care of the Chernobyl power plant referred to themselves as "stalkers".
Midway in the film, the Stalker has an interior monologue in which he quotes the entire section 76 of Laozi's Tao Te Ching, the text of which characterizes softness and pliancy as qualities of a newborn, hence, new life; hardness and strength, on the contrary, are qualities nearing death. ("Man, when he enters life, is soft and weak. When he dies he is hard and strong.")
Slavistic says that in the context of late Soviet stagnation, Tarkovsky makes a contrast between the oppressive dystopia of the outside world—marked by industrial decay, pollution, alienation, and political repression—and the Zone, a realm of beauty and mystery. In conjunction with the Room, they act as representations of new possibilities, a utopia amidst the anti-utopian world of modern society, offering an escape from the constraints of the decaying society. The film reflects the disillusionment of late socialism, which fell short of the communist utopia, resulting in a stagnant and sterile reality.
In this film, Tarkovsky wishes to emphasize two essentially human aspects, faith and love. He believes that faith "cannot be dissolved or broken down, [it] forms like a crystal in the soul of each of us and constitutes its great worth," and that when humans feel that there is no more hope in the world, love is what proves to them otherwise. The Writer feels as though the world has become mundane and ordinary, and has become cynical regarding it; he desires to be shaken by the unknown that is the Zone. What ends up surprising him is not the Zone, but instead, the Stalker's wife and her faithfulness to the stalker even after all he has put her through. "Her love and her devotion are that final miracle which can be set against the unbelief, cynicism, moral vacuum poisoning the modern world, of which both the Writer and the Scientist are victims." In Tarkovsky's films, he believes that it is his responsibility to make his viewers aware and reflect on their need to love and to give their love.
Style Like Tarkovsky's other films, Stalker relies on long takes with slow, subtle camera movement, rejecting the use of rapid montage. The film contains 142 shots in 163 minutes, with an average shot length of more than one minute and many shots lasting for more than four minutes.
Production Writing After reading the novel Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky initially recommended it to a friend, the film director Mikhail Kalatozov, thinking Kalatozov might be interested in adapting it into a film. Kalatozov abandoned the project when he could not obtain the rights to the novel. Tarkovsky then became very interested in adapting the novel and expanding its concepts. He hoped it would allow him to make a film which conformed to the classical Aristotelian unity: a single action, on a single location, within 24 hours (single point in time).