The Zone, however, is lush and green, an organic profusion of growth and chaos which creates a stark contrast to the decaying rigidity of the city. The people are as exhausted and worn down as their surroundings. Everything seems to be leaking or cracked and the sounds of machinery predominate. That city is a grim glimpse of a thoroughly industrialized and poverty-stricken future.

Tarkovsky uses color to set apart the different worlds, filming the scenes set in Stalker’s home city in gloriously dismal sepia and those in the Zone in color. Had Ingmar Bergman decided to tackle science fiction, he may have produced a film equally fascinating, but Tarkovsky’s vision was, and remains, a unique entry in weird cinema. Tarkovsky works all this material into a profound, eerily quiet meditation on faith, nihilism and hope. Part tour guide, part coyote, part spiritual advisor, these people bring their customers into and through the beautiful, perilous Zone, offering counsel on what might be accomplished in the wish-granting room all the while. As a result of this situation, a new profession has arisen, that of the Stalkers. Despite looking benign, even cheerful (next to the grim realities of the city), the Zone is said to be protected by obscure traps, all but unpredictable dangers which have destroyed careless questers for years. The Zone was cordoned off, and is now protected with such zealotry that people are shot down rather than be permitted to slip into it. Twenty years ago, an object thought to be a meteorite crashed here, and countless people went missing in the vicinity. This strange landscape is the Zone, the site of a metaphysical trauma around which armed guards patrol.

Their destination is a room which sits at the center of this countryside, a room in which dreams are rumored to be fulfilled. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, three men leave the confines of a rotting Eastern European city and walk through a pleasant-looking rural setting.

Stalker noise of the zone