Some critics have discussed Stalker in terms of its prophetic value, as a foreshadowing of Chernobyl. There are justifications to the claim. The film is set in a half-abandoned hydroelectric station, and the idea of a Zone that supposedly surrounds it does bear some creepily coincidental resemblances with the infected area created around Chernobyl after it exploded. The premature deaths of the director and his wife from cancer are also linked to Stalker. In Stas Tyrkin’s essay “In Stalker Tarkovsky Foretold Chernobyl,” Vladimir Sharun, who worked on Stalker’s sound, says that one day while they were shooting snow started falling. The fact that at the time it was summer made it seem very suspicious. Sharun also says that there was a chemical plant nearby that was throwing its waste in the river around which the film was made.

Other critics such as Andrea Truppin have talked about Stalker’s use of sound as a means of representing the “paradox of religious faith” that has people believing in something that they cannot see. Which brings us to the film as a parable of finding -- or not finding -- the spirituality which Tarkovsky considers to be amiss from modern life. Suggestions like these also stand on solid ground. Writer is the intellectual who has lost all inspiration and belief and turns to the Room as his last hope, while Scientist with his firm logic and moral code wants to destroy the Room. The Stalker on the other hand, a poor, working-class ex-prisoner with a paralyzed daughter, is the only of the three that the Zone tolerates. Coincidentally, he’s also the one person who doesn’t want to use the Room for his own good. rather, he finds fulfillment in bringing others in need there. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that the Stalker is aware from the very beginning of what the other two characters only discover later: that which one thinks to be one’s innermost wish might actually be quite different to what one really wishes for.

All these interpretations are fine, but none of them capture the experience of watching Stalker. Above all, Stalker is about enjoying cinema and all its potential, as put forth and pushed to its limit by Tarkovsky. Startling visual images of poetic value abound, inviting the viewer either to participate actively in the production of their meaning or to surrender to their mesmerizing effect. Tantamount to the visual impact is the director's technique. Hypnotic long takes that seem to last forever and unexpected changes between black and white and color photography alter the viewer’s sense of time and recall a subconscious state where the past, the present, and the future all exist at the same instance and in the same space.

Stalker's prevailing mood or feeling is very successfully portrayed in the ending when the Stalker’s immobile daughter moves some glasses telekinetically; the feeling or sense conveyed is one of great power. Some may call this power spirituality. Others may call it religion. But in all cases this power is as humane as it is divine. Perhaps it’s the God within us that Tarkovsky is trying to bring out.