This is the most important artistic film ever made, in my humble layman's opinion. Andrei Tarkovsky and David Lynch are the most important film makers ever. This will not change, since they created at the summit of the classical cinema hall era, and this time is gone forever, due to technological advancement. You need to understand that the film is designed for a full quality wide screen, professional sound system cinema hall, and what you can see here is but a shadow of the real thing. Also, watching it together with many people with similar interests rather than alone matters, too, in my humble opinion. The subject of the film is introspection of the human mind, also known as meditation. The parallel between the outside world and the mind is masterful, and it passed the Soviet censorship, even though the film is obviously profoundly religious. Of course, Tarkovsky has been murdered by the KGB, a fact recognised even by the Marxist Wikipedia, which dares, for example, to question the Holodomor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Causes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Tarkovsky#Death. The plot is inspired by the novel "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which is a masterpiece in its own right. I remember reading the preface to it written by Theodore Sturgeon, a sacred monster of the Science-Fiction literature himself, to the edition published by his own publishing house. He was venerating the piece, and rightly so. The plot of the original story is placed in America, and this explains the usage of the English word for stalker. However, the Russian Christian messianism is plain to see, in the novel and in the film. I mention here that the Russians are known for their strong Christian beliefs and that, after seven decades of ruthless communism, in the first day after the fall of the Communist Party from power, the Russian churches were full. A link to "Stalker": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGRDYpCmMcM