Songs from the Second Floor (2000)

AKA Sånger från andra våningen

Directed by
Roy Andersson

Written by
Roy Andersson

A man is standing in a subway car, his face dirty with soot. In his right hand he carries a plastic bag with documents, or rather, the charred leftovers of them. In a corridor a man is clinging desperately to the legs of the boss who just fired him. He is screaming: "I've been here for thirty years!" In a coffee shop someone is waiting for his father, who just burned his furniture company for insurance money. Traffic jams and self-flagellating stock brokers are filling up the streets while an economist, desperate for a solution to the problem of work becoming too expensive, gazes into the crystal ball of a scryer. Everything and everyone is going somewhere but their goal and its meaning have disappeared along the way.

The film presents a series of disconnected vignettes that together interrogate aspects of modern life. The film uses many quotations from the work of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo as a recurring motif.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120263/

Eraserhead (1977)

Directed by
David Lynch

Writing credits
David Lynch

Eraserhead is set in the heart of an industrial center rife with urban decay. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is a printer who is "on vacation" for the duration of the story. The film begins with the mysterious "Man in the Planet" (Jack Fisk) manipulating large mechanical levers while looking out of his window. As he does so, a ghostly flagellate-like creature emerges from the mouth of Henry, floating in space. The creature eventually flies away amidst images of rock formations, a circular opening, and bubbling fluid.

In the industrial center of the nameless city, Henry stumbles through the seemingly unpopulated wasteland to his apartment building with a bag of groceries. A neighbor he is not familiar with, the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall (Judith Anna Roberts), tells him that his estranged girlfriend Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) has invited him to dinner with her and her family. A sharp, distorted hissing noise (presumably the radiator) is continuously heard in Henry's one room apartment. Large clumps of cut grass lay on the floor, a dead tree sapling planted in a pile of dirt sits directly on his nightstand, and a framed picture of a nuclear explosion hangs on the wall above it. The only window in his apartment faces a brick wall of another building in the alley across the window from his tenement building.

That evening, Henry walks through the industrial wasteland and arrives at Mary's home. Henry is disturbed by the awkward conversation forced by Mary's mother as well as a strange fit Mary has; her mother reacts to it by furiously brushing her daughter's hair. At the dinner table, Henry is puzzled by an emotional outburst by Mary's mother (Jeanne Bates), the banal, disconnected conversation offered by her father (Allen Joseph), and miniature man-made roasted chicken he is given to carve, which kicks on his plate and gushes a dark liquid at the fork's touch. The dinner conversation at Mary's house is strained and awkward, after which Henry is cornered by Mary's mother, who attempts to kiss him before telling him that Mary has just given birth extremely prematurely. A tearful Mary insists that the hospital does not know whether it even is a baby she gave birth to; her mother insists that it is a baby and that Henry is then obliged to marry her.

Mary and the baby move into Henry's one-room apartment. The baby is hideously deformed and very inhuman-like: its face resembles a large snout with slit nostrils, a long, pencil-thin neck, eyes on the sides of its head, no ears, glossy skin and a limbless body covered in bandages. It bears a vague resemblance to the flagellate creature that came out of Henry's mouth at the beginning of the film. Henry and Mary constantly struggle with caring for the baby as it refuses to eat and continually whines throughout the night. Mary feeding her "baby". A hysterical Mary temporarily leaves for home one night due to her inability to sleep with the whining baby in Henry's apartment. She demands that the vacationing Henry take good care of the baby. After the baby falls silent, Henry checks its temperature. Looking away briefly to read the thermometer, Henry looks back at the baby to find that it is covered with sores and gasping for breath. Left to care for the baby by himself, Henry becomes involved in a series of strange events (many of which have little to no explanation to how or why they happen). These include bizarre encounters with the Lady in the Radiator (Laurel Near); visions of the Man in the Planet, and a sexual liaison with the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall. The Lady in the Radiator is a miniature woman with grotesquely distended cheeks who appears in his radiator, first doing a dance routine on a stage in which she slowly shuffles back and forth and stomps on more of the flagellate creatures that fall from above, and then later singing "In Heaven".

In a dream sequence, Henry’s head pops off and his baby's head comes up from between his shoulders, replacing it. Henry's head sinks into a growing pool of blood on a tile floor, falls from the sky, and, finally, lands on an empty street in the industrial wasteland and cracks open. A young boy finds Henry's broken head and takes it to a pencil factory, where Paul (Darwin Joston), the desk clerk, summons his ill-tempered boss to the front desk by repeatedly pushing a buzzer. The boss, angered by the summons, yells at Paul, but regains his composure when he sees what the little boy has brought. The boss and the boy carry the head to a back room where the Pencil Machine Operator takes a core sample of Henry's brain, assays it, and determines that it is a serviceable material for pencil erasers. The boy is then paid for bringing in Henry's head. The Pencil Machine Operator then sweeps the eraser shavings off the desk and sends them billowing into the air.

After waking from this dream, Henry looks out his window and sees two men fighting in the street. He then seeks out the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, but discovers that she is not home. The baby begins to cackle mockingly, and, shortly thereafter, Henry opens his door and sees the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall bringing another man back to her apartment. She looks at Henry, momentarily sees Henry's head transform into that of the baby, and appears frightened by her vision. Henry goes back into his apartment. Upon hearing the baby whine, he retrieves a pair of scissors. He hesitates, then cautiously cuts open the bandages wrapped around the baby's body, the baby hyperventilating and whining during the cutting. Henry finds that the bandages were the only thing containing the baby's internal organs; the body already split open and the baby's vital organs are exposed. As the baby gasps in pain, Henry stabs one of its organs with the scissors. Rather than dying, the baby continues to convulse in pain, causing Henry to turn away in disgust. Large amounts of liquid gush forth from the organs, followed by huge quantities of a foamy substance that completely covers the body. The apartment’s electricity overloads, and as the lights flicker on and off, the baby's neck extends to an extraordinary length, causing it to strongly resemble the flagellate creatures seen throughout the film. A giant apparition of its head materializes in the apartment. It then becomes a strange planet. Henry is then seen with eraser shavings billowing behind his head.

The planet explodes, and through the hole in it the Man in the Planet is seen struggling with a series of levers with sparks shooting from them when he pulls them, visibly burning his face. The last scene features Henry being embraced by the Lady in the Radiator. They are bathed in white light, and white noise builds to a crescendo, then stops as the screen goes black, and the credits begin to roll.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074486/

Blow Up (1966)

AKA Blowup

Directed by
Michelangelo Antonioni        

Writing credits
Michelangelo Antonioni (story)
Julio Cortázar (short story "Las babas del diablo")
Edward Bond (English dialogue)
Michelangelo Antonioni
Tonino Guerra

The plot is a day in the life of Thomas (David Hemmings), a fashion photographer. It begins after spending the night at a doss house where he has taken pictures for a book of art photos. He is late for a photo shoot with Veruschka at his studio, which in turn makes him late for a shoot with other models later in the morning. He grows bored and walks off, leaving the models and production staff in the lurch. As he leaves the studio, two teenage girls, aspiring models (Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills), ask to speak with him, but Thomas drives off to look at an antiques shop. Wandering into Maryon Park, he takes photos of two lovers. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) is furious at being photographed. Thomas is startled when she stalks him back to his studio, asking for the film. This makes him want the film even more, so he hands her another roll instead. His many blowups (enlargements) of the black and white film have rough film grain but seem to show a body in the grass and a killer lurking in the trees with a gun. Thomas is frightened by a knock on the door, but it is the two girls again, with whom he has a romp in his studio and falls asleep. Awakening, he finds they hope he will photograph them but he tells the girls to leave, saying, "Tomorrow! Come back tomorrow!"

As evening falls, Thomas goes back to the park and finds a body, but he has not brought his camera and is scared off by a twig breaking, as if being stepped on. Thomas returns to his studio to find that all the negatives and prints are gone except for one very grainy blowup showing the body. At a drug-drenched party in a house on the Thames near central London, he finds both Veruschka (who tells him she is in Paris) and his agent (Peter Bowles), whom he wants to bring to the park as a witness. However, Thomas cannot put across what he has photographed. Waking up in the house at sunrise, he goes back to the park alone, but the body is gone.

Befuddled, he watches a mimed tennis match, is drawn into it, picks up the imaginary ball and throws it back to the two players. While he watches the mime, the sound of the ball being played is heard. As the photographer watches this alone on the lawn he walks into the distance, leaving only the grass as the film ends.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060176/

Mother and Son (1997)

AKA Mat i syn


Directed by
Aleksandr Sokurov

Writing credits
Yuri Arabov

The film opens on two human forms, which soon reveal themselves to be that of a young man and a frail, old woman. They recline in a silence penetrated only by whispers and indistinguishable noises. The young man is the son (Alexei Ananishnov) who is taking care of his exhausted, sick mother (Gudrun Geyer). Her illness is undefined and from time to time causes her great pain as she gasps for air. Her son combs her hair, feeds her, covers her with a coat, and takes her in his arms. She is totally dependent on him as he himself was once totally dependent on her. As the film progresses, the son carries his mother on a long journey, from her sick-bed to her death-bed. It is a circular motion, which travels a long walk through a dream-like landscape in the countryside, along winding dirt roads. At each of their brief stops on the journey is a moment of contemplation, caresses, and tender murmurs. These soft murmurs tell of the mother's love for her son when she was nurturing him and of the son's love for his mother as he opens for her the mysterious path to her death. They progress under the leaden and luminous ski of the Baltic, in totally isolated landscapes. From time to time, there is a far away train or a sail on the sea, emphasizing further their isolation from the rest of the world

They return to the house. The son tenderly lowers his mother into her bed, which now seems to resemble a coffin. Both know that the end is nearing, although he tries to reassure her to the contrary. He leaves her for a time and goes for a long, solitary walk. When he returns, his mother may have died.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119711/

Stranger Than Paradise (1984)

Directed by
Jim Jarmusch

Written by
Jim Jarmusch

The film is a three-act story about self-identified "hipster" Willie (John Lurie), who lives in New York City, and his interactions with the two other main characters, Eva (Eszter Balint) and Eddie (Richard Edson).

In the first act, Willie's cousin Eva comes from Hungary to stay with him for ten days because Aunt Lotte, whom she will be staying with, will be in the hospital. Willie at first makes it clear that he does not want her there, but soon begins to enjoy her company. This becomes especially true when Eva steals food items from a grocery store and gets a TV dinner for Willie. He ends up buying her a dress, which she later discards. After ten days, Eva leaves, and Willie is clearly upset to see her go. Eddie, who had met Eva previously, sees her right before she goes.

The second act opens with a long take showing Willie and Eddie winning a large amount of money by cheating at a game of poker. Willie decides, because of all the money they now have, to leave the city. They decide to go to Cleveland to see Eva. However, when they get there they are just as bored as they were in New York. For example, they end up tagging along with Eva and a friend, Billy, to the movies. They eventually decide to go back to New York.

The final act begins with Willie and Eddie, on their way back to New York, deciding to go to Florida. They turn around and "rescue" Eva. The three of them get to Florida and get a room at a hotel. They end up losing all of their money on dog races. At this point, they decide to go back and bet on horse races. Willie refuses to let Eva come along, so she goes out on the beach for a walk. She ends up being mistaken by a drug dealer, and is given a large sum of money. She goes back to the hotel, leaves some of the money for Willie and Eddie, and writes them a note explaining that she is going to the airport, and then goes there. When she arrives, she discovers that the only flight to Europe left that day is to Budapest, which is where she originally came from. She decides to wait until the following day, and goes back to the hotel. Willie and Eddie end up winning all of their money back at the horse races. But when they get back, Eva is gone, and Willie reads her note and they go to the airport to stop her from leaving. When they get there, Willie is forced to buy a ticket to get on the plane to find Eva. However, he gets on right before the plane takes off, and ends up going on the flight to Budapest. The second to last shot shows Eddie outside watching the plane leave, and he realizes what has happened. The final shot shows Eva back at the hotel, returning to an empty room.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088184/

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

AKA Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma

Directed by
Pier Paolo Pasolini        

Writing credits
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Sergio Citti
Pupi Avati

The film is set in the Republic of Salò, the Fascist-occupied portion of Italy in 1944. The story is in four segments loosely parallel to Dante's Inferno: the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, and the Circle of Blood.

Four men of power, the Duke (Duc de Blangis), the Bishop, the Magistrate (Curval), and the President (apparently Durcet) agree to marry each other's daughters as the first step in a debauched ritual. With the aid of several collaborator young men, they kidnap eighteen young men and women (nine of each sex), and take them to a palace near Marzabotto. Accompanying them are four middle-aged prostitutes, also collaborators, whose function in the debauchery will be to recount erotically arousing stories for the men of power, and who, in turn, will sadistically exploit their victims.

The story depicts some of the many days at the palace, during which the four men of power devise increasingly abhorrent tortures and humiliations for their own pleasure. In the Anteinferno segment, the captures of some victims by the collaborators are shown, and, later, the four lords examining them. The Circle of Manias presents some of the stories in the first part of Sade's book, told by Mrs. Vaccari (Hélène Surgère). In the Circle of Shit, the passions escalate in intensity from mainly non-penetrative sex to coprophagia. A most infamous scene shows a young woman forced to eat the feces of the Duke; later, the other victims are presented a giant meal of human feces. The Circle of Blood starts with a black mass-like wedding between the guards and the men of power, after which the Bishop has sex with a male victim. The Bishop then leaves to examine the captives in their rooms, where they start systematically betraying each other: one girl is revealed to be hiding a photograph, two girls are shown to be having a secret sexual affair, and finally, a collaborator (Ezio Manni) and the black servant (Ines Pellegrini) are shot down after being found having sex. Toward the end, the remaining victims are murdered through methods like scalping, branding, tongue and eyes cut out as each libertine takes his turn to watch, as voyeur.

The film's final shot portrays the complacency, myopia, and desensitization of the masses: two young soldiers, who had witnessed and collaborated in all of the prior atrocities, dance a simple waltz together.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073650/

In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

AKA 愛のコリーダ 完全ノーカット版 / Ai no Korīda

Director:
Nagisa Ôshima

Writer:
Nagisa Ôshima

In 1936 Tokyo, Sada Abe (Matsuda) is a former prostitute who works as a maid in a hotel. The hotel's owner, Kichizo Ishida, molests her, and the two begin an intense affair that consists of sexual experiments, drinking, and various other indulgences. Ishida leaves his wife and family to pursue his affair with Abe. Abe becomes increasingly possessive and jealous of Ishida, and Ishida more eager to please her. Their mutual obsession escalates to the point where Ishida finds he is most excited by being strangled during lovemaking, and he is killed in this fashion. Abe then severs his penis and writes "Sada Kichi the two of us forever" in blood on his chest.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074102/

Floating Weeds (1959)

AKA Ukigusa

Director:
Yasujirô Ozu

Writers:
Kôgo Noda
Yasujirô Ozu

The film takes place during a hot summer in 1958 at a seaside town in the Inland Sea. A troupe of travelling theatre arrives by ship, headed by the troupe's lead actor and owner, Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura). The rest of the troupe goes around the town to promote their kabuki acts.

Komajuro visits his former mistress, Oyoshi, who runs a small eatery in the town. They have a grown-up son Kiyoshi, who now works at the post office as a mail clerk and is saving up to go to the university. However, he does not know who Komajuro is, thinking he is his uncle. Komajuro invites Kiyoshi to go fishing in the sea.

When Sumiko, the lead actress of the troupe and Komajuro's current mistress, learns that Komajuro is visiting his former mistress, she becomes jealous and makes a visit to Oyoshi's eatery, where Kiyoshi and Komajuro are playing a game of go. Komajuro chases her away before she can say anything destructive, then confronts her in the pouring rain. He tells her to get off her back from her son, and decides to break up with her. Sumiko calls Komajuro an ingrate, and cites examples when she has helped him out in the past.

Backstage one day, Sumiko offers Kayo, a pretty young actress from the same troupe, some money and asks her to seduce Kiyoshi. Although Kayo at first refuses, she gives in after Sumiko's insistence. She goes to Kiyoshi's post office to make him fall for her. However, after knowing Kiyoshi for some time, she falls for him and decides to tell Kiyoshi the truth. Kiyoshi says it does not matter how it all starts. The two then engage in a relationship which only later is found out by Komajuro.

Komajuro confronts Kayo, who tells him of Sumiko's setup, but only after asserting she now loves Kiyoshi and is not doing it for money. Komajuro has a violent confrontation with Sumiko, and refuses to listen to her plea for a reconciliation.

The manager of the troupe has absconded, and business is bad. Komajuro has no choice but to disband the troupe, and they have a last night together. Komajuro then goes to Oyoshi's place and tells her of his troupe's break-up. Oyoshi persuades him to tell Kiyoshi the truth about his parenthood and then stay together her place as a family. Komajuro agrees. When Kiyoshi later comes back with Kayo, Komajuro becomes so enraged to see them together that he beats both of them repeatedly, leading to a physical tussle between Kiyoshi and him. Oyoshi is forced to reveal to him the truth about his birth there, but Kiyoshi refuses to accept it and goes to his room upstairs. Taking in Kiyoshi's reaction, Komajuro decides to leave after all. Kayo wants to join him, but Komajuro asks her to stay to help Kiyoshi out. Kiyoshi later has a change of heart and goes downstairs to look for Komajuro, but his father has already left.

At the train station, Komajuro tries to light a cigarette but has no matches. Sumiko, who is sitting nearby, comes up and offers him a light. Sumiko asks where Komajuro is going, since she has now no place to go. The two reconcile and Sumiko decides to join Komajuro to start anew under another impresario at Kuwana. The last scene of the film shows Komajuro, tended by Sumiko, in a train heading for Kuwana.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053390/

Audition (1999)

AKA オーディション, Ōdishon

Directed by
Takashi Miike

Written by
Ryû Murakami (novel)
Daisuke Tengan (screenplay)

Shigeharu Aoyama (青山 重治 Aoyama Shigeharu) (Ryo Ishibashi), a middle-aged widower of seven years, is urged by his 17-year-old son, Shigehiko Aoyama (青山 重彦 Aoyama Shigehiko) (Tetsu Sawaki), to begin dating again. Aoyama is reluctant. His friend and colleague Yasuhisa Yoshikawa (吉川泰久 Yoshikawa Yasuhisa) (Jun Kunimura), a film producer, devises a mock casting audition in which young women would audition for the "part" of Aoyama's new wife. Aoyama tentatively agrees to the plan. He is immediately enchanted by Asami Yamazaki (山崎 麻美 Yamazaki Asami) (Eihi Shiina). In her audition, Asami says that she was a ballerina but had to give up dancing after an injury. Aoyama is attracted to her apparent emotional depth.

Yoshikawa says that he has a bad feeling about Asami. He cannot reach any of the references on her résumé, and her job history is sketchy. The music producer she claimed to work for is missing. Aoyama is so enthralled by her that he pursues the romance anyway.

She lives in an empty apartment, containing a sack and a telephone. For four days after the audition, she sits perfectly still in the middle of the floor next to the telephone, waiting for it to ring. When it finally does, the sack lurches across the room and makes gurgling sounds. When Asami answers the phone, she pretends to Aoyama that she never expected him to call.

After several dates, she agrees to accompany him to a seaside hotel. Asami reveals that she was abused as a child and shows burn scars on her body. A deeply moved Aoyama pledges his love, and they have sex. In the morning, Aoyama is awakened by a telephone call. It is the front desk inquiring if he will be checking out since his companion has left. Asami is nowhere to be found.

Aoyama tries to track her down using her résumé, but as Yoshikawa warned all of the contacts are dead ends. At the dance studio where she claimed to have trained, he finds only a man with prosthetic feet who shares the name of Asami's childhood abuser. The bar where she claimed to work has been abandoned for a year following the murder and dismemberment of the owner. A passer-by tells Aoyama that the police found three extra fingers, an extra ear, and an extra tongue when they recovered the body.

Meanwhile, Asami goes to Aoyama's house. She finds a photo of his late wife. Enraged, she drugs his liquor decanter and hides. Aoyama comes home, pours a drink, and begins feeling the effects of the drug.

A flashback sequence shows that the sack in Asami's apartment contains a man missing both feet, his tongue, one ear and three fingers on one hand. He crawls out of the sack and begs for food. Asami vomits into a dog dish and places it on the floor for the man. The man sticks his face in the bowl of vomit, and hungrily consumes it.

Aoyama collapses from the drug. Asami injects Aoyama with a paralysis agent that leaves his nerves alert. She tortures him with needles. She tells him that, just like everyone else in her life, he has failed to love her only. She cannot tolerate his feelings for anyone else, even his own son. She claims she is teaching him the meaning of needing someone. She tells him that, "Words create lies, pain can be trusted." She giggles as she cuts off his left foot with a wire saw.

Shigehiko returns home as Asami begins to cut off Aoyama's other foot, and they struggle. Aoyama has a dream that he is waking up after he and Asami made love, and that his ordeal was only a nightmare. He awakes from the dream to see his son still struggling with Asami. Shigehiko kicks her down a flight of stairs, breaking her neck. Aoyama tells his son to call the police. Aoyama stares at the dying figure of Asami. She mutters incoherently about her excitement on seeing him again. He remembers that in the dream, he comforted her by saying, "It's hard to forget about, but someday you'll feel that life is wonderful."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235198/

The Adventure (1960)

AKA L'avventura

Directed by
Michelangelo Antonioni        

Writing credits
Michelangelo Antonioni
Elio Bartolini
Tonino Guerra

L'Avventura has a narrative structure in which an apparently important central mystery is gradually forgotten and left unsolved.

The story begins as two young women, Anna (Lea Massari) and Claudia (Monica Vitti), meet for a yacht trip. After picking up Anna's lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), the three join two wealthy couples from Rome on the boat and visit "Lisca Bianca," an almost unpopulated volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, where Anna shows her boredom and unhappiness with the sometimes childish Sandro. After napping on the rocks, they awaken to find that Anna has gone without a trace. Annoyed at first, then worried, they search for her, helped by Anna's diplomat father who soon comes to the island with a police ship and helicopter.

Within a few days, they drift back to their lives as the story shifts to a new and somewhat stormy relationship between Sandro and Claudia who is at once happy and wracked with guilt over her missing best friend. On the rooftop of a cathedral, Sandro asks Claudia to marry him, but she is too startled by this to answer in a meaningful way. The two then check into a swank resort hotel near Messina where Sandro's business partner is staying. While Claudia goes to bed, Sandro stays up and wanders among the partying guests. Claudia spends a sleepless night waiting for him to come back to their room and as dawn breaks frantically searches for Sandro throughout the deserted public spaces of the hotel, only to find him on a couch with a costly call girl. Claudia flees them both and breaks down into tears on a vista overlooking the sea. Sandro, seemingly disgusted with himself, catches up to her.

The last scene, which has no dialogue, starkly shows Sandro's almost hopeless weakness and emptiness as he sits in tears before a blank, scarred wall. Claudia stands steadfastly beside him, while Mount Etna broods behind her as if ready to erupt.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053619/

Ecstasy of the Angels (1972)

AKA 天使の恍惚 / Tenshi no kôkotsu

Director:
Kôji Wakamatsu

Writer:
Masao Adachi

A group of militant extremists whom we know only by their code names - the days of the week - realize that they've been betrayed by their own organization when a nocturnal weapons raid on a U.S. Army base goes awry. The delicate internal balance of trust and friendship splinters apart. Their already fragile, idealistic young psyches quickly disintegrate into a morass of sexual paranoia, violent recrimination and sadistic torture that completely destroys their ability to function as an organization.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069358/

Stalker (1979)

AKA Сталкер

Directed by
Andrei Tarkovsky        

Writing credits
Arkadiy Strugatskiy (novel "The Roadside Picnic")
Boris Strugatskiy (novel "The Roadside Picnic")
Arkadiy Strugatskiy
Boris Strugatskiy

The setting of the film is a tiny town on the outskirts of the Zone, a wilderness area which has been cordoned off by the government. The film's main character, the Stalker, works as a guide to bring people in and out of the Zone, to "the Room", which is said to grant the deepest, innermost wishes of anyone who steps inside. Residual effects of an undefined previous occurrence have transformed an otherwise mundane rural area scattered with ruined buildings into an area where the normal laws of physics no longer apply.

The film begins, in black and white, with the Stalker in his home with his wife and daughter. His wife emotionally urges him not to leave her again to go into the Zone because of the legal consequences, but he ignores her pleas. The Stalker goes to a bar, where he meets the Writer and the Professor, who will be his clients on his next trip into the Zone. The Writer and the Professor are never identified by name — the Stalker prefers to refer to them in this way. The three of them evade the military blockade that guards the Zone using an 88" Series II Land-Rover — attracting gunfire from the guards as they go — and then ride into the heart of the Zone on a railway handcar. The camera follows their passage from urban setting to rural, and from the darkness required for their infiltration of the Zone, to light. This is also the point in the movie where the film switches to color.

The Stalker tells his clients that they must do exactly as he says to survive the dangers that, while invisible, are all around them. Although the Stalker describes extreme danger at all times, no harm comes to any of the three men; there is a tension between disbelief of the need for his elaborate precautions and the possibility that they are necessary. The Stalker tests various routes by throwing metal nuts tied with strips of cloth ahead of him before walking into a new area. The Zone appears peaceful and harmless. The Writer is skeptical that there is any real danger, while the Professor generally follows the Stalker's advice.

Much of the film focuses on the trip through the apparently dangerous Zone and the philosophical discussions that the characters share about their reasons for wanting to visit the Room. The Writer appears concerned that he is losing his inspiration, while the Professor apparently hopes to win a Nobel prize. Meanwhile, the Stalker — who explains that he has never gone into the Room himself — quotes from the New Testament and bemoans the loss of faith in society. Throughout the film, the Stalker refers to a previous Stalker, named "Porcupine," who led his poet brother to his death in the Zone, visited the Room and gained a lot of money, and then hanged himself. The implication is that our "deepest, innermost desires" are opaque even to ourselves, and the overt desire to win the lottery was coupled with the covert and unexpressed - perhaps unconscious - desire for his brother's death, and when Porcupine realized this, he killed himself to expiate his guilt. When the Writer confronts the Stalker about his knowledge of the Zone and the Room, he says that it all comes from Porcupine.

The trio first walk through meadows and then enter a tunnel that the Stalker calls "the meat grinder." In one of the decayed buildings, a phone inexplicably begins to ring. The Writer answers and says to whoever is on the other end that "this is not the clinic," and hangs up. The Professor then uses the phone to call a colleague. In the resultant conversation he reveals some of his true motives for having come to the Room. He has brought a bomb with him and intends to destroy the Room out of fear that it could be used for personal gain by evil men. The three men fight verbally and physically; the Professor backs down from his plan to destroy the Room. Their journey ends when they finally arrive at the entrance to the Room. A long take leaves the men sitting outside the Room, who then never enter it.[2] Rain begins to fall from a dark sky where a ceiling once was, into the ruined building, and the rainstorm gradually fades away, all in one shot.

The next scene shows the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor back in the bar. The Stalker's wife and child arrive. A mysterious black dog that followed the three men through the Zone is now in the bar with them. His wife asks where he got it; the Stalker says that it got attached to him and he could not leave it in the Zone. As the Stalker leaves the bar with his family and the dog, we see that his child, nicknamed "Monkey" is crippled, and cannot walk unaided. (Earlier dialogue has suggested that the child is affected by some form of genetic mutation as a "child of the Zone.") Later, when the Stalker's wife says she would like to visit the Room, he seems to have doubts about the Zone; he tells her he fears her dreams will not be fulfilled. While breaking the fourth wall, the Stalker's wife then contemplates her relationship with the Stalker, only to conclude that she is better off with him. The film ends with Monkey alone in the kitchen. She recites a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev and then lays her head on the table and appears to psychokinetically push three drinking glasses across the table, one after the other, with the last one falling to the floor. After the third glass falls to the floor, a train passes by (as in the beginning of the film), causing the entire apartment to shake.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/