Solaris by Stanisław LemMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A troubled psychologist is sent to investigate the crew of an isolated research station orbiting a bizarre planet, whose ocean functions as a huge, fluid-like brain. This "brain" may be responsible for the mental disruptions the crew members experience - it apparently gives life to the contents of the unconscious mind. In the station, the psychologist meets his deceased wife, with whom he had a passionate relationship before she committed suicide. It is of course not really his wife - she is an amalgam of his memories of her that have taken physical shape. But our memories of even those closest to us are never the complete, other person - we always know others only partially, and on top of that, through our own prejudices. The wife is suicidal, she complains, because that is how her husband views her. The psychologist struggles with his memories and his feelings of regret and tries to find an opportunity for a second chance. A sharp and incisive exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious.
Screen adaptations by Tarkovsky (1972, a legendary film) and Steven Soderbergh (2002).
View all my reviews