Solaris (1972)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, adapted from Stanisław Lem’s novel, 1972.
Plot
Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, is sent to a nearly abandoned research station orbiting Solaris, a planet covered entirely by a sentient ocean. The previous crew has gone to pieces — one has killed himself, the other two are barricaded in their cabins muttering about “guests.” Kelvin finds out what they mean on his first night: he wakes up and his wife Hari is sitting on his bed. She’s been dead for ten years; she killed herself after he left her.
This Hari isn’t a ghost; she’s a perfect physical copy materialized by the ocean out of Kelvin’s memory of her. She doesn’t know she’s a copy at first. When she figures it out — when she finds out she can’t die, that her body reconstitutes itself, that she exists only because Kelvin remembered her — the film becomes a very slow, very painful love story about whether love can survive the knowledge that the beloved is literally a projection.
The closing shot is Kelvin kneeling to embrace his father on the porch of his childhood home, which turns out to be an island of memory floating on the ocean itself.
What It’s About
Tarkovsky openly disliked Lem’s novel, which is cold, cerebral, and about the unknowability of alien intelligence. Tarkovsky wanted to talk about memory, guilt, and whether you can love another person without reducing them to a version of yourself you need.
In Proustian terms, Solaris is involuntary memory given flesh — the planet forces Kelvin to live inside his own regret the way a madeleine forces a narrator to live inside a lost afternoon. In Freudian terms, it’s repetition-compulsion as sci-fi premise: Kelvin gets to replay the failure over and over, and every iteration is more painful because Hari keeps gaining consciousness of what she is.
Tarkovsky layers in Russian Orthodox iconography — Rublev icons on the station walls, the closing shot as a visual echo of the Return of the Prodigal Son — because for him the question isn’t “is the ocean alien?” but “can a human being be forgiven?” The ocean is closer to God than to E.T.
The pacing is glacial on purpose. A long silent drive through Tokyo highways stands in for “Earth we are leaving.” Weightless books float in zero-G to Bach. The film wants you to feel the weight of remembered life, not its speed.
Connections
- Andrei Tarkovsky — his first full metaphysical work; template for everything after
- Marcel Proust — involuntary memory, the past as a sensible present
- Dream Psychology — Hari as wish-fulfillment given flesh
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle — repetition-compulsion as the engine of the plot
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — the Orthodox question of guilt and forgiveness running underneath the sci-fi
Lineage
Predecessors: Lem’s novel; Dostoevsky’s religious meditations; Proust’s memory metaphysics; Bach’s St Matthew Passion (quoted in the score).
Successors: Soderbergh’s 2002 remake; Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival; Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin; Alex Garland’s Ex Machina; every subsequent sci-fi film that treats space as a mirror of inner life rather than a frontier.