Before you enter, read these rules. Read them carefully. Read them more than once. They will not save you, but they are all you have.
Rule 1: The Zone is not what it was.
Something happened here. A meteorite, possibly. An extraterrestrial visitation, possibly. Nobody is certain and the film does not clarify because clarification is not the Zone’s business. What matters is the result: a restricted area outside an unnamed city, cordoned off with barbed wire and armed guards, where the normal laws of physics have been suspended or replaced by laws that nobody can reliably describe.
Inside the Zone is a Room. The Room is said to grant your deepest wish.
The Stalker will take you there. That is his profession. He has done this before. He will do it again. His wife begs him not to go. He goes anyway. He always goes anyway. His daughter cannot walk without help. There may be a connection.
Rule 2: Do not go directly.
The shortest path is not the safest path. In the Zone, the shortest path may not exist. The Stalker insists on indirect routes. He throws metal nuts tied to strips of cloth ahead of the group to test for traps. The traps are invisible. You will not see them. You will not feel them until it is too late. The bandaged nuts arc through the air and land in the grass, and if they land safely, you may walk where they landed. If they do not land, you were not meant to walk there.
This is the rule. This is also a description of the film itself. Andrei Tarkovsky does not take you to the Room directly. He takes you the long way, through puddles and ruins and conversations that circle and digress and arrive somewhere you did not expect. The film is 163 minutes long. There are 142 shots. The average film has two to three thousand. You will feel the time. You are meant to feel the time. The time is the journey.
Rule 3: The world outside is sepia. The Zone is color.
This is the visual contract. In the city where the Stalker lives, everything is the color of exhaustion: a yellowish-brown monochrome that drains the walls, the faces, the bar where the three men meet, the bed where his wife lies waiting. The city looks like a place where color has been taxed out of existence.
When the men cross into the Zone on a railway work car, the image shifts. The sepia lifts. Green arrives. Not the green of postcards. The green of the world breathing without permission. Grass grows through rusted metal. Water pools in abandoned rooms. Trees lean over industrial wreckage with the patience of centuries. The Zone is beautiful. This is one of its traps.
Rule 4: There are three men. They have no names.
The Stalker. The Writer. The Professor. That is all you are given. Tarkovsky strips them to their functions the way the Zone strips them to their desires.
Alexander Kaidanovsky plays the Stalker as a man held together by faith and nothing else. He is gaunt. His head is shaved. His eyes contain the specific exhaustion of someone who has spent years believing in something he cannot prove to people who do not want to believe. He is not a hero. He is a guide. He is the person who stands at the edge of the Zone and says: I will take you in, and the rules will keep us safe, and I know this because I have been here before and I am still alive. Whether his survival is evidence of the rules or merely luck is a question the film will ask and never answer.
Anatoly Solonitsyn plays the Writer as a man who has come to the Zone because his inspiration has dried up and he wants it back. He is sardonic. He is afraid. He drinks. At one point he wears a crown of thorns, casually, as if it were a hat. He is the character who most openly challenges the Stalker’s rules, who most wants the Zone to be a fraud so he can stop hoping.
Nikolai Grinko plays the Professor as a man who has come for reasons he does not disclose. He carries a backpack. The contents of the backpack will become important. His reasons are not what they appear.
Rule 5: The Zone is a complex maze of traps.
The Stalker says this. He says it with the certainty of scripture. “The Zone demands respect, otherwise it will punish you.” He speaks of a previous stalker named Porcupine who led his own brother to his death here and then entered the Room. The Room granted Porcupine’s deepest wish. His deepest wish was not what he thought it was. He wanted money, not his brother’s life. He received money. He hanged himself.
This is the story the Stalker tells. It is a warning. It is also the key to the entire film: the Room does not grant the wish you carry in your conscious mind. It grants the wish you carry beneath it, the one you cannot see, the one you might not survive discovering. The Room is a mirror pointed at the floor of your self.
Rule 6: The rules may not be real.
The Writer tests this. Frustrated with the Stalker’s caution, he walks directly toward the building that houses the Room. Straight line. No nuts thrown. No bandages. He strides forward and the camera follows him and you watch the back of his head and you wait for something terrible to happen.
Nothing happens.
He arrives at the building. He is fine. The Zone let him through. The Stalker is distressed. The Writer is smug. And you, watching, are left with the question that will define the rest of the film: are the rules real? Has the Zone always had traps, or has it always been an empty field with a room at the center that does nothing? Is the Stalker a guide or a priest? Is there a difference?
Rule 7: Water is everywhere.
Tarkovsky was asked about the water in his films. Water appears in every film he ever made. In Stalker, the Zone is a drenched world. Puddles fill every corridor. Streams run through abandoned buildings. Rain falls inside rooms that have roofs. The men wade through water that rises to their knees. The camera glides over submerged objects: a syringe, coins, a religious icon, the pages of a book, a pistol. All of it underwater. All of it visible and unreachable.
Tarkovsky said the rain in his films was not symbolic. He said it was because it is always raining in Russia. This is either the deepest artistic statement a filmmaker has ever made or the simplest, and the difference between those two possibilities is the difference between the Stalker and the Writer, which is the difference between faith and skepticism, which is the subject of the film.
Rule 8: There is a tunnel called the Meat Grinder.
Many people have died in it. Porcupine’s brother died in it. The Stalker warns the Writer and the Professor before they enter. The tunnel is dark and wet and narrow and the men crawl through it on their bellies, and the camera follows them, and the walls press close, and the sound of water fills everything.
They survive. The Stalker says the Writer is lucky. The Writer does not feel lucky. The Writer feels wet and angry and increasingly certain that the Zone is a hoax. The film does not confirm or deny. The film is not in the business of confirming or denying. The film is in the business of walking through the Meat Grinder and surviving and not knowing why.
Rule 9: When you reach the Room, you will not enter.
They arrive. Three men, soaked and exhausted, sitting on the threshold of a room inside a ruined industrial building. The Room is right there. Through that doorway. The wish is waiting.
Nobody goes in.
The Writer does not go in because he is afraid of what his deepest wish might be. The Professor does not go in because he has brought a bomb in his backpack and intends to destroy the Room, to prevent it from being used by someone evil, and then he decides not to do that either, and dismantles the bomb, and throws the pieces into the water. The Stalker does not go in because the Stalker has never gone in. He has spent his life bringing people to this door and watching them stand in front of it and he has never crossed the threshold himself.
They sit on the floor. They lean against each other. It begins to rain inside the Room. It stops. It begins again. The camera holds.
This is the scene. This is the destination. You have traveled 163 minutes to reach a doorway that nobody walks through, and the extraordinary thing is that you do not feel cheated. You feel as though you have arrived at the only possible ending. Because the film was never about the Room. It was about the walk. It was about whether the walk has meaning if the Room is empty, whether faith requires an object or only a direction.
Rule 10: The Stalker will return home and despair.
He comes back. Sepia again. The bar. His wife. His daughter Monkey, who cannot walk, who does not speak. He is furious and devastated. He curses the Writer and the Professor. They were intelligent men who believed in nothing. Their organ of belief has atrophied. He carried them through the Zone and they refused the Room and now he is home and his life is the same and his daughter cannot walk and the Zone is the only place where anything is possible and nobody will go into the Room.
His wife takes him to bed. She speaks directly to the camera. She addresses you. She says she knew when she married him that life would be hard, that he would be unreliable, that their children might be deformed. She says she is better off with him despite the grief. She says this without self-pity, without performance, looking into the lens. It is one of the most quietly devastating monologues in cinema. Alisa Freindlich delivers it as a woman who has chosen suffering over safety and does not regret the choice and does not pretend the choice was easy.
Rule 11: There are no rules.
The final scene. Monkey sits at the kitchen table. She lays her head down. She looks at three drinking glasses. One by one, the glasses slide across the table. Nobody is touching them. Monkey is moving them with her mind.
The third glass, the empty one, falls from the table. It does not break. A train passes outside. The apartment shakes, as it always shakes, as it shook in the opening scene, and the glasses rattle, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony rises on the soundtrack, and the film ends.
The Zone is real. Or: Monkey is the proof that the Zone is real. Or: the Stalker went into the Room at some point and wished for his daughter to be special and his wish was granted and his daughter is special and his daughter is the evidence and the evidence has been sitting in his apartment this whole time and he never saw it.
Or: there are no rules. There were never any rules. The bandaged nuts, the indirect paths, the warnings about traps, the story of Porcupine, the Meat Grinder, the threshold, the rain inside the Room. None of it was real. All of it was real. The Zone is whatever you need it to be, which is the cruelest and most generous thing a film has ever said about faith.
Rule 12: This film was shot twice.
Tarkovsky spent a year filming all the outdoor scenes. The crew returned to Moscow and discovered the film stock had been improperly developed. All the footage was unusable. Every frame. Gone.
He nearly abandoned the project. He fired his cinematographer. He started over. The film you see is the second attempt, shot by Alexander Knyazhinsky, and it is one of the most beautiful films ever made, and it exists only because the first version was destroyed, which means Stalker is itself a film about returning to the Zone, about walking a path you have already walked, about having faith that the journey is worth repeating even though the first attempt yielded nothing.
Several people involved in the production later died of causes some attributed to the toxic locations where they filmed. The chemical plant upstream poured poison into the river. Snow fell in summer. White foam floated on the water. The Zone was not entirely fiction.
Final instruction: You may now enter. Or you may sit at the threshold and not enter. Both are correct. Both are the film.
Stalker (Сталкер) Director: Andrei Tarkovsky Country: Soviet Union Year: 1979 Runtime: 163 minutes
Leave a Reply