12 Sci-Fi Movies That NOBODY Understands

Adapted from the novel Roadside Picnic, Stalker follows its three protagonists, the titular stalker, a depressed author, and a naïve scientist, as they endeavour to explore a restricted Zone thought to grant the wishes of its rare visitors. What follows is an existential trip like no other, with the director borrowing from Beckett and Camus as well as the source material as the trio encounter all manner of strangeness in what appears to be a post-nuclear, post-industrial, possibly post-reality wasteland.

It’s nigh-on impossible to interpret in literal terms, but critics and scholars are still debating the film’s metaphysical, political, and cultural themes decades later, mining deep allegorical meaning from this strange trip and its many odd, at times discomfiting, encounters.