Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy is a stalker. No, he isn't after attractive young females (you're already disappointed?). In fact, he is married, to borderline attractive Alisa Freyndlikh, and has a young daughter, Natasha Abramova.
Kaydanovskiy's actual occupation is a guide. He leads troubled risk-takers through a forbidden, abandoned, and purportedly dangerous "zone" of wilderness and tunnels to and from a safe house where, allegedly, a room exists that will magically grant your innermost wish.
His customers today are Nikolay Grinko, a college professor; and Anatoliy Solonitsyn, an obscure writer. Solonitsyn seems obsessed with his knapsack and its mysterious contents. After numerous interminable scenes, our three leads finally reach the safe house, where the writer produces a bomb from his knapsack. The three then mope for a while, and return home safely.
How I felt about it. Tarkovskiy is probably the most famous Russian director since Sergei Eisenstein. He first came to the attention of the west in 1962 with Ivan's Childhood, nearly a very good film. I have seen Andrei Rublev and it is excellent, undoubtedly his best work. Tarkovskiy followed these successes with three strange movies that are highly popular today among cinephiles but hardly up to the level of Rublev: Solaris, The Mirror and Stalker.
Solaris is at least interesting. It's been a while since I saw The Mirror, but I remember it as a plotless mess. Stalker does have a story, but the execution is a letdown. We are told how dangerous this "zone" is, but we don't see why. The place might be abandoned as a toxic waste dump for all we know. At long last, we are at the precipice of the magic room, but the camera never goes inside. There are no 2001-style revelations. No evidence is shown that the room actually has any effect. A bomb is shown, but there is no explosion. Then, the three men return, as if nothing happened.
A danger without consequences, a magic room without magic, a bomb without a burst: a movie without action. Much talk and angst, but most of all, tedium.
How others will see it. Nonetheless, most view the film differently. It has a huge 35K user votes at imdb.com, with a whopping 8.1 user rating. It is in the lower reaches of that website's Top 250. Ratings do decline with advancing age, from 9.0 under 18, to 8.4 under 30, to 8.0 under 45, and 6.9 over 45. Women over 45 give it just 5.4 out of 10, noteworthy since that demographic is less influenced by any other.
As often happens with science fiction movies, viewers try to add meaning to the film that it doesn't have. For example, Stalker is not an allegory of the Soviet state. If it were, as the director said, he would not have received financing to make the movie.
So, why do young people (those under 40) love Stalker? Favorable user reviews at imdb.com conclude it is a psychological drama with the fears of the "stalker" on display, as well as his witch doctor superstitions about what you can and can't do in the "zone."
One reason for the movie's popularity may be its backstory. The three leads all died fairly young, as did the director. Thus, there are tragic aspects. The movie is also famous as a remake of a lost film. That is, the movie was completed, then ruined during its post-production, then remade from scratch with a much lower budget. One wonders, if the original version had survived, would it have been measurably better? Though we will never know, the answer is: likely not.