Movie review: Stalker (1979)

Been a long time since I posted anything, sorry. The culprit is MTG Forge's adventure mode, but I willed myself to delete it and am now free to resume life.

Since I loved Dersu Uzala and was very interested in the idea of the "Zone", Stalker is my latest watch deserving a review.

This is the kind of masterpiece that justifiably allows some people to put cinema on the same level as music or painting as an artform. The cinematography, the exceptional playacting and the soundtrack all mix to produce an unparalleled amount of anxiety, as if you were there with those three men.

Quite similar to that tense opening scene from The Thing, I felt hurled into a strange world with an ubiquitous yet invisible danger, a seemingly empty vastness that instantly filled me with a strong sense of unease, a feeling that something bad is constantly on the verge of happening.

As mentioned earlier, the cinematography - very still or smoothly panning/traveling - makes you forget that there's a camera filming, giving the impression that your own eyes are spectating the eerie trek. It's really key to the immersion I experienced.

Then there's the actors. Especially Kaidanovsky (the eponymous stalker) who masterfully expresses a contagious panic and reverence of the Zone. His manic wavering between fear and assurance almost remind of the lunatic Lawrence of Arabia. Solonitsyn (the Writer) is the complementary ingredient, displaying a slowly crumbling bravado and cynical self-loathing that serves as a wonderful prop for the stalker and Professor to react.

And finally (again, like The Thing), the very minimalist and sparse "music" adds a great deal of atmosphere and immersion when it's there. Stalker without its music would almost be like Quake without its dark ambient soundtrack.

Summing up everything, I'd say it's probably one of my favourite movies ever, but like most slow cinema, it suffers from occasional pacing issues; hard not to go over the line even once in 2h40m of runtime. I found the 4 minutes long poetic interlude right in the middle especially damaging to the overall rhythm, and a few scenes a bit too stretched out. Really echoes the sentiment I expressed on my HANA-BI review.

But now I'm truly interested in reading the source novel, Roadside Picnic…

Important but very harmful spoiler for anyone attracted to the sci-fi/supernatural elements mentioned in the various blurbs: nothing of the sort actually happens, it's a Blair Witch Project thing.