Stunning philosophical sci-fi was perfected in 1979 with Tarkovsky’s Stalker

Every weekend, we pick a movie you can stream that dovetails with current events. Old, new, blockbuster, arthouse: They’re all fair game. What you can count on is a weekend watch that sheds new light on the week that was. The movie of the week for October 7 through 13 is Stalker (1979), which is available to digitally rent on Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, and Amazon.

Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is a long, slow-moving film — it clocks in at 2 hours and 44 minutes, which is 46 minutes longer than Ridley Scott’s 1982 original in its theatrical version. And it’s three minutes longer than another famously long, slow-moving work that might come to mind for those who go see the new film this weekend: Stalker, the 1979 sci-fi classic from the celebrated Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky.

That’s not to say that Blade Runner 2049 and Stalker are equals, or that the former will attain the status of the latter over time. (I don’t think it’s likely.)

But there are similarities nonetheless. Both films move quite slowly. Both use every moment of their lengthy runtimes to generate a contemplative mood. Both are visually stunning. And both are more interested in philosophical questions than action sequences (though Blade Runner 2049 has much more action than Stalker).

One of Blade Runner 2049’s main interests, however, is the nature of freedom, and the way it explores that theme alongside stunning imagery makes it a fine film to pair with Stalker. (Stalker was recently restored and made the rounds in theaters across the country before Criterion released it this summer. If you can get your hands on the Blu-Ray version, you owe it to yourself to watch it that way. If not, then the digital stream will suffice.)

Stalker mainly concerns itself with three men who all remain nameless and refer to each other only by their professions: the Professor (Nikolay Grinko), the Writer (Anatoliy Solonitsyn), and the Stalker (Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy). The Stalker is the one who illegally leads people through the “Zone,” which the government has sealed off to outsiders; it’s known as a highly dangerous place where the normal rules of the universe do not apply. Within the Zone lies a place called the “Room,” where the wishes of anyone who enters are granted. The trio manages to get into the Zone, and as they travel toward the Room, they talk about why they want to go there. The journey turns out to be much more about what’s inside the travelers’ souls than what they physically see and experience along the way.

But what they see and experience is pretty striking, too. Tarkovsky spent years making Stalker, and after problems with the first round of filming, he reshot almost the whole thing. Like all of his movies, it leans on very long takes — there are only 142 shots in the entire 163-minute movie, a remarkably low number — to create an aura of contemplation as well as tension and dread.

The result is visually staggering, shot in sepia tones and loaded with images that are among the finest in cinema. Watching Stalker is more like participating in a guided meditation than anything else, and that’s what makes it great: It isn’t just about the characters on screen asking important questions and coming to enlightening yet incomplete realizations, but about turning those questions onto ourselves.

One question that Stalker plumbs — unsurprisingly, from a filmmaker working in the twilight years of the Soviet regime — is what it means to be free, to leave one place for another that we believe will be less restrictive, only to discover that freedom has its costs. At the heart of Stalker is the story of a man who reached the Room and was granted his wish to become wealthy, only to turn around and kill himself. The Room reveals its visitors’ unconscious desires; is that what we want from our freedom?

If we were truly free, would it be too frightening? Would we want to go back to the safety of not knowing? (In his dream diaries from the period, Tarkovsky seems to have suggested this, recounting of one dream in which he left prison and then returned to it, “I was worried about how I was going to be received, but that was as nothing compared with the horror of being out of prison.”)

There are elements of this question lurking around the edges of Blade Runner 2049, as they were in Blade Runner, and though they’re handled a bit less elegantly in Villeneuve’s film than Tarkovsky’s or even Scott’s, it’s striking to see them resurface over and over in science fiction. In marrying them with long, slow, sometimes interminable-feeling images — something Blade Runner 2049 also tries to do — Stalker makes us contemplate the same concepts. Science fiction always acts as a mirror; in Stalker, that mirror is turned toward the darkest reaches of the human heart.

Watch the trailer for Stalker: