"The story of three strangers’ quest into The Zone to reach The Room, an enigmatic enclave that allegedly grants visitors their deepest, darkest wish, 1979’s Stalker, which is loosely based on the novel The Roadside Picnic, may not be the most signifier-loaded film in the auteur’s canon. Nonetheless, it remains a dense, complex, often-contradictory, and endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness, the necessity for faith in an increasingly secular, rational world, and the ugly, unpleasant dreams and desires that reside in the hearts of men."