On more than one occasion, Stalker has been referred to as “the film that killed Andrei Tarkovsky,” who, to those unfamiliar with his work, is best described as Soviet Russia’s answer to Stanley Kubrick.

Throughout the film’s initial year-long production period (which was followed by two complete reshoots), Tarkosvky and his crew spent countless hours wading rivers of oil, filming amidst toxic plumes of ash, and camping out for days at a time inside derelict power plants. This lack of precaution - or sheer artistic dedication, depending on how you look at it - inevitably came back to haunt them in the years following Stalker’s release, a period which saw Tarkovsky and many others involved in the film’s creation dying from eerily similar health complications.

"We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkosvkaya died from the same illness in Paris." —Vladmir Sharun

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Unsurprisingly, the grim circumstances surrounding Stalker’s production closely mirror the sentiment of the film itself.

The plot follows the eponymous “stalker” (Woody Harrelson’s long-lost Russian twin?) as he guides his two clients – a stubborn scientist and a philosophically distraught writer – into the heart of a dystopian government exclusion zone, driven by rumors of a supernatural room that miraculously grants the innermost desires of its visitors.

However, like most Tarkovsky flicks, plot is almost secondary to other storytelling elements; in fact, the plot consciously wanders at times, with more emphasis being placed instead on each of its character’s tangential soliloquies regarding morality, destiny, the plight of man, and the meaning of life itself.

Needless to say, it’s filled to the brim with allegory, symbolism, metaphorical imagery - all that fun stuff that’ll no doubt have you plugging “stalker explained” into your search engines after watching (don’t feel guilty, we all do it).

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Stalker is this week’s Friday Night Flick. It’s a cult-favorite amongst cinema nerds, and is consequently featured on several “greatest of all time” lists. If you can’t stomach its borderline-nihilistic themes, watch it for its dreamlike cinematography and the masterful acting chops of its three leads. But above all else, the film exists as a testament to the genius of Tarkovsky and the hardline commitment he held to his own artistic vision. —Jackson Todd

““To make a film you need money. To write a poem all you need is pen and paper. This puts cinema at a disadvantage. But I think cinema is invincible, and I bow down to all the directors who try to realise their own films despite everything.””

— Andrei Tarkovsky