Psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sent to a space station orbiting the oceanic planet Solaris after the crew fails to respond to routine communications. He finds that the skeleton crew has been experiencing hallucinations and one crew member has killed himself. The other two seem resigned to their descent to madness. Kris isn't there for two hours before his dead wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), appears before him. And he immediately launches her into space, which is the most relatable fucking thing anyone has ever done in a sci-fi movie. But obviously she comes back and the other scientist, Snaut (Jüri Järvet), tells Kris that the hallucinations started after they probed the planet with x-rays. Snaut thinks the planet itself is sending them to better understand its orbiters without realizing that it's driving them insane.
The plot makes it sound like space horror, which it kind of is, and not the meditative questioning of what it means to be human, which it definitely is. Your mileage will vary on that last part, depending on how much you enjoy two hours and 45 minutes of Russian musings interspersed with montages of paintings and books being destroyed. It's a slow burn, you could say.
This was one of the first sci-fi films to deal with the emotional side, not the "we're in space" side, and it's an important film for that. It is not a fun film. It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max.
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