Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker (Сталкер) is not the great or masterful film its most ardent critical supporters proclaim it to be, nor is it the slow, boring Eurotrash that its most vocal critics counterclaim. It lies somewhere in between: a film that risks and occasionally fails, although it is far closer to greatness than trash.

That’s because Tarkovsky has crafted a film of unusual visuals and even more unusual power. There are scenes that recall the old telefilm The Lathe Of Heaven, released the same year as this film, 1979; Carl Theodor Dreyer’s great Vampyr, in its use of shadows and fog; the 1976 sci-fi classic Logan’s Run, in that the three leads of the film are running away from their society; Tarkovsky’s earlier Solaris, in its mix of color and sepia images; and, most of all, Alex Proyas’s 1998 sci-fi classic Dark City, which, like Stalker, creates a wholly believable alternate world unlike any other put on screen. Visually, Stalker most reminds me of the human portraits of the great Austrian painter Egon Schiele, with his myriad of gaunt, pallid, balding, dirty, twisted characters.

However, as in most Tarkovsky films, it is not the visuals that dominate, but the philosophic depth of the characters. What they don’t say or dream is almost always as important as what they do say and dream. Stalker succeeds because its ellipses are more brilliant than its phrases. Stalker misses greatness, however, because its phrases sometimes fail. Here is a précis of the film's two hours and 43 minutes.

Based on a novel called Roadside Picnic, by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, the film opens with a narrative scroll explaining that in the near future, part of Siberia has been tainted by the crash of either a meteorite or a flying saucer some two decades earlier. The land about the crash site is called the Zone (an eerily prescient presaging of the coming Chernobyl disaster, wherein the land about the disaster was also called the Zone). The Zone is a place into which people seemingly disappear, but may be guided to a mystic room where dreams can come true by what is called a stalker - a person of ethos and selflessness. We later learn that stalkers may be human-alien hybrids.

We then see a room in sepia, with much action going on, very reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky’s later Pi. Then we pan over a bed and see the nameless titular Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) waking beside his bitching wife (Alisa Freindlich), who loathes the fact that he has been hired to guide two more intellectuals on a quest. They also have a seemingly deaf-mute little blonde daughter, called Monkey (Natasha Abramova), who is a cripple.