Stalker (1979)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Near a gray and unnamed city is the Zone, a place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers, and where the normal laws of physics are victim to frequent anomalies. A stalker guides two men into the Zone, specifically to an area in which deep-seated desires are granted.
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What critics compared Stalker to
Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” with a strong no-nonsense heroine and pulse-racing creature attacks, and suddenly, such an excursion starts to sound enticing for those who otherwise can’t abide slow cinema (or the kind of ontological concerns this movie raises).
Based on Jeff VanderMeer's novel, Annihilation slightly resembles Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), a highly artistic masterpiece from a much braver time, when audiences were less likely to balk at ambiguity.
Annihilation, which Garland adapted from the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, is a riveting and often unnerving combination of head trip sci-fi on the order of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stalker and high-end, Ten Little Indians-style creature feature like Alien and The Thing.
Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker" also comes to mind, but one wishes Garland was more influenced by the latter than the former.
From the score that mounts from a recognizable, melodic charge to something that’s significantly less human, to cold and measured performances, to visuals that harken back to Stalker and Stanley Kubrick, but are decidedly Garland’s- the film is masterfully composed.
That lush, dewy garden is both a nod to an earthly paradise lost and a reference to Douglas Trumbull’s “Silent Running” — one of a few ’70s science-fiction classics, including those Andrei Tarkovsky landmarks “Solaris” and “Stalker,” that reverberate amid this movie’s deep gloom and spare, temporally ambiguous visual design.
Besides, the most immediate point of reference for “High Life” isn’t George Lucas or Andrei Tarkovsky (though “Stalker” is an obvious lodestar for Denis, both in its mechanics and in its mystery), it’s Paul Schrader, whose “First Reformed” might be the only recent film to be so preoccupied with the end of all existence, and the possibility of wresting some kind of future from the obsidian-black darkness that stretches out before us.
The only distant predecessors are probably Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker , which Denis calls her "good luck charms" in the press notes and whose influence you can feel in the way she cuts between the harsh surfaces of the spaceship (which have a very video-like HD look to them) and the grainier textures of Earth (which were shot on 16mm).
Clearly Denis is operating under the creative influence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1970s sci-fi classics, “Solaris” and “Stalker,” potent blends of psychological thriller and adventure into the unknown.
It’s as if on Earth High Life is in the realm of Stalker ; in space, where memory and hallucination stake their claim, in that of Solaris .
You can look to recent films like Upstream Color or Cloud Atlas or go further back to The Man Who Fell to Earth , Stalker, or even 2001: A Space Odyssey .
There is a “Stalker“-esque, almost science fiction vibe to these ambiguities, especially amid the film’s annihilated landscapes, but “Loveless” unfolds in the recent past, not the near future.
The methodical searching of an abandoned building that the boys used as a camp is reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky's vision of dripping multilevel ruin in Stalker.
It’s a revelation that proves as terrifying as anything brought in the film’s resolution, which develops incrementally towards a conclusion that has all the inexorability of the territory (it comes with some exterior locations that match even Tarkovsky’s Stalker for wondrous dereliction).
The plangent dialogue is surpassed by the child’s flat gaze upon a flat, gray, all-but-done city, face round, unblinking like the girl who makes magic at the end of Tarkovsky’s “Stalker.”
The decrepit apartment complex is straight out of the 1979 Stalker , with its murky puddles and piles of debris, and there’s even a quasi-in-joke reference to that film when one of the places the lost-child brigade goes to post fliers is a government complex with the words “forbidden zone” printed on the gate.
The hunt takes them through apartment blocks, dense forests, abandoned wastelands, and, most notably, a decaying Soviet-era complex that once housed conference rooms, a movie theater, and a basketball court — a massive, decrepit building that looks at times like it came right out of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker .
Take, for instance, a scene where Lorraine makes mince meat of a Russian henchman's face behind the screen of a movie theater playing Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker."
The film serves up these bravura moments in entertainingly different ways — sometimes with an artsy backdrop (Lorraine battles in a movie theatre while Tarkovsky’s Stalker plays on a large screen behind her), and other times with a gripping simplicity, like when she has to journey through a seemingly abandoned building, shooting and punching her way to safety.
In a debriefing room at MI-6, she narrates the events of the preceding week to a British handler (Toby Jones) and a guest from the CIA (John Goodman): She is sent to West Berlin to recover a list of Western agents called, er, “the List”; makes contact with the punk-rock local station chief, Percival (James McAvoy), who has a side business selling Jordache jeans to East Berliners; stabs thugs at a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker ; and has a fling with a rookie French intelligence agent, Delphine (Sofia Boutella).
It ain’t art, either, even if Lorraine does fight a few villains in silhouette against a Berlin movie screen playing Andrei Tarkosky’s “Stalker.”
There’s one fight sequence where Lorraine takes on a bad guy in front of a movie screen showing Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which will give a nice laugh to cinephiles like me.
Here, his more pretentious reference is to Tarkovsky (Broughton fights a bunch of henchmen at a screening of Stalker), and there is the suggestion that collapsing, nightmare-ish East Berlin has become like Stalker’s zone: a lawless, borderless place that allows people to live out their desires, to find their true selves — for better or for worse.
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As we will learn, he hails from near Chernobyl, in Ukraine, and so, as everyone jokes, must be radioactive (and in yet another cinematic reference, demonstrates possible telekinetic abilities à la the child in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 Stalker).
In returning to sources (Tarkovsky is referenced multiple times throughout, one chapter title included), examining the self (a particularly on-the-nose Antichrist callback emerges; maybe as a joke, maybe not) and making convergences (yet another image of a Gainsbourg character lying in a field makes way for a pronounced Stalker homage), a genuine softness and delicacy — melancholy, one might say — runs through the current of sex and recklessness.
If the landscape owes something to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the pairing of this disembodied voice with images of paradise lost recall the films of Terrence Malick, especially The Thin Red Line.
The first explicitly recalls the extended, behind-the-car tracking shot in Solaris, while the second, which is a long camera track looking into a mud puddle, seems to nod toward similar shots in Stalker.
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But even beyond that, Wheatley is delving into themes found in Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf .
In the Earth sees Wheatley aping Andrei Tarkovsky by taking liberally from Stalker , but it also sees him aping himself by rehashing A Field in England much more predictably.
There are obvious Alice In Wonderland references, alongside bits of David Lynch, Tarsem Singh, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shining and even Tarkovsky’s Stalker.