By the commonly told story, the first attempt at STALKER was lost in a Mosfilm lab: footage shot on faulty stock was ruined, the original cinematographer, Georgy Rerberg, was dismissed, and Tarkovsky started over, shooting the film essentially a second time with a new cinematographer, Aleksandr Knyazhinsky.

STALKER (1979) is what survived that ordeal. Andrei Tarkovsky’s film follows a guide known only as Stalker, played by Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy, who leads two men, a Writer and a Professor, into a forbidden area called the Zone. At its center is a Room where a person’s innermost wish is said to come true.

The Zone offers no monsters or explosions to its trespassers. It seems to rearrange itself, and straight paths become dangerous. The men who speak of reason and art find themselves hesitating at the threshold of getting what they want.

It is often said that the toxic conditions around the shoot, near a polluted river in Estonia, contributed to illnesses among the cast and crew. Tarkovsky himself died of cancer in 1986.

The film runs 163 minutes and plays more like a meditation than a science fiction adventure. It asks what people actually do when granted the one thing they claim to want most, and never really settles the answer.