Solaris

Psychologist Kris Kelvin travels to a remote space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris to assess the mental state of its surviving crew. There, he discovers scientists haunted by living embodiments of their own memories and guilt, born from the planet’s sentient ocean. When Kelvin confronts an apparition of his dead wife, reality and illusion blur, drawing him into a profound meditation on love, loss, and the fragile depths of the human soul.

The film was the most widely seen of Tarkovsky’s works abroad, bridging Soviet cinema with international art-film audiences.

Although based on the novel by Stanisław Lem, Tarkovsky radically re-shaped the story to focus less on alien contact science-fiction and more on human emotions and memory.

Its soundtrack melds Bach’s sacred organ chorale Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (BWV 639) with pioneering Soviet electronic scores by Eduard Artemyev—creating an unexpected blend of holy classical and futuristic ambient sound.

The design of the space-station interior was deliberately non-slick and lived-in: cluttered, worn-down, with art-history references (including paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and a nod to Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son). Tarkovsky wanted to ground the future in human history, not shiny tech.

The original novel’s author Lem was famously dissatisfied with the adaptation—he felt that Tarkovsky had changed the novel’s concerns from epistemology and alien-intelligence to more introspective human themes.

Despite its Russian language and Soviet production, Solaris premiered at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury—an affirmation of its artistic value in the international avant-garde.

The “ocean-planet” Solaris itself was physically created in the studio using a mixture of acetone, aluminium powder and dyes to simulate a living sea, reflecting Tarkovsky’s desire for tactile, almost alchemical visuals