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Stalker

Turkish title: İz Sürücü

“There's no need to speak. You must only...concentrate and recall all your past life. When a man thinks of the past, he becomes kinder.”

1979 · 2 h 42 min
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Cast

Alexander Kaidanovsky Alisa Freindlich Anatoly Solonitsyn Nikolai Grinko

Credits

Written by: Arkadiy Strugatskiy Boris Strugatskiy
Music: Eduard Artemyev

Plot

In a bleak, post-industrial country, a guide called the Stalker leads a Writer and a Professor into the Zone, a forbidden area where, it is said, a room can grant a person's deepest wish. The journey through the waterlogged, overgrown landscape becomes a test of faith and doubt, with the men arguing about what they truly want. Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film, loosely based on a novel by the Strugatsky brothers, is a slow, hypnotic spiritual parable.

Sinekatalog’s take

Tarkovsky sends a guide, a writer and a scientist into a forbidden Zone said to grant wishes. Slow, hypnotic and philosophical, it rewards patience with some of cinema's most haunting images.Sinekatalog’s own editorial review – not a user or critic quote.

Ratings

IMDb: 8.0 / 10 (158,515 votes)
Rotten Tomatoes: 100% (47 critic reviews)
IMDb rating and vote count from the IMDb ratings dataset; Rotten Tomatoes snapshot from October 2026. Scores change over time.

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