While waiting, Professor gets a call from a colleague, whom the Professor dismisses. He then reveals that he has brought or found a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb and means to destroy the Zone, whose powers, he fears, could be harnessed by future Hitlers or Stalins. The trio struggles, and Writer sides with Professor. Yet Professor relents, and in a single shot that lasts five or more minutes, the three men simply sit pondering what to do. They never enter the room. A sun shower fills the dank anteroom with water and light. It ends a few minutes later, with no cuts, and then we revert from the color of the Zone to the sepia of life outside it.

The trio, now back in the bar where they met, go their separate ways. Stalker’s wife and child are there; they return home, and he goes to sleep, as at the beginning of the film. The shots of Monkey, however, revert to color, suggesting she is even more intimately tied to the Zone than her father. After tucking him in, his wife speaks to the camera about her life with Stalker, good and bad. Then we see Monkey, bored, sitting at a table in silence, head resting sideways upon it, as Beethoven’s "Ode To Joy" ironically plays, and she telekinetically moves three glasses on her kitchen table.

This odd ending, however, is one of the film’s most manifest failures, even if the Kino DVD cover calls it ‘one of the most enigmatic and tantalizing endings in the history of cinema.’ It does not rank with the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, nor even Solaris, for it is rather dull.

Critics tend to imbue the end with a lot of meaning, but it’s really a dud, a non-ending in the worst sense. After all, we know that Monkey is related to the Zone, not only by the aforementioned visual cue, but because Writer and Professor have talked of her being possibly a genetic mutant, or unearthly. Thus, the viewer is expecting something to occur when we see the girl alone. What do we get? A cheap parlor trick.

Compare this to a truly enigmatic ending, like the final scene of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. In that film, the lead character, a psychotic young murderess played by Catherine Deneuve, is taken away from the apartment she left to ruin, and the camera pans around very slowly until it stops upon a family portrait in a shaft of light in the otherwise darkened room. It then pulls slowly in to the figure, then the face, then the eyes of a little blonde girl who is looking off to her left, away from all the others in the photo. Her look is fearful yet detached. Is it the Deneuve character as a child? Does this suggest some long and deep psychosis rooted in her past? Perhaps abuse, physical or sexual? We are left hanging, but in the best sense, since we had no idea that such a finale was coming. The scene tantalizes the viewer into reading from the character’s past to explain her present.