IMDb #207 Review: Stalker (1979)

Source: Wikipedia

A writer, a professor, and the titular Stalker venture into the Zone, a mysterious quarantined location like the Chernobyl disaster area except afflicted with *space magic*. The Zone allegedly grants wishes, such as colorizing grainy black-and-white Soviet Russia like a depressing communist Oz.

So as the nameless characters putz around the grim natural beauty, the Stalker, a glorified tour guide, rambles vaguely about human desire and the supernatural whims of the Zone. The job benefits must be great, because he never explains anything outright. Especially not why this poor sad man makes shitty money taking inquisitive idiots into space magic land to support his shrewish wife and physically disabled daughter Monkey.

Anyway.

Weird shit happens in the Zone. Time and space warp. Traps, marked with dangling bandages, dog them every step of the way. Then an actual dog starts following them. A telephone rings.

Meanwhile, these walking philosophical archetypes drop random Biblical references: Daniel’s writing on the wall, Revelation’s apocalypse, the road to Emmaus.

Sound thrilling? This plot progresses at the pace of a mentally challenged slug. Strewn in the slug’s slimy path are lingering environmental shots, whole minutes of silence, abstract conversation, and withering anticlimax. There are no gunfights, no spiffy special effects, no explosions (well, almost one).

Chekhov’s gun remains on the mantlepiece, discussed in excruciating detail from multiple ideological angles, but never fired. As you can imagine, a pall of weary futility hangs over everything.

But the mood, the setting, the indirect world-building? Mesmerizing.

This plodding philosophical excursion is probably better viewed alone, not a party setting. Or you might have to answer unanswerable questions. Such as,“What the hell was that?”