While Tartovsky is well known for his slow pacing and poetic cinematographic lingering, this film takes his style to an unnecessary extreme. I appreciated Solaris but it wasn't done very well here. For sure, there are moments of reflection and deep visual symbolism but most of the time I was just watching pensive faces reacting to nothing at all, or repeated pleas from the stalker to listen to his instructions. There was a decent attempt at expressing some deep messages but these could have been done in a much more succinct runtime without any loss of meaning or effect: We all need some magic in the world, we don't always know what we truly want or need, we will never truly be satisfied with our searching, and so on. The uniquely spooky cinematographic and aural atmosphere deserve commendation but this didn't make up for the truly dreadful pace.