Stalker (film)

Stalker (Russian: Сталкер) is a 1979 film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It describes the journey of three men travelling through a post-apocalyptic wilderness called the Zone to find a room with the potential to fulfill one's innermost desires. The title role is played by Alexander Kaidanovsky, who guides two others through the area, the Writer, played by Anatoly Solonitsyn, and the Professor, played by Nikolai Grinko. Alisa Freindlich played the Stalker's wife.

The film is loosely based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. An early draft of the screenplay was also published as a novel Stalker that differs much from the finished movie. In Roadside Picnic, the Zone is full of strange artifacts and phenomena that defy known science. A vestige of this idea carries over to the film, in the form of Stalker's habit of throwing metal nuts down a path before walking along it. The characters in Roadside Picnic do something similar when they suspect they are near gravitational anomalies that could crush them.

"Stalker", an English word employed in the original novel, should not be understood in the contemporary, sinister sense, but rather in the older sense of a tracker of game.