CriterionCast

Episode 185 – Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker

This time on the podcast, Trevor Berrett and Scott Nye discuss Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphys­ical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a professor into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one’s most deeply held desires. Adapting a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky created an immersive world with a wealth of material detail and a sense of organic atmosphere. A religious allegory, a reflection of contemporaneous political anxieties, a meditation on film itself—Stalkerenvelops the viewer by opening up a multitude of possible meanings.

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Trevor Berrett