Solaris

Chris Kelvin is a clinical psychologist in a near-future Earth, mourning his wife Rheya, who killed herself two years ago. He goes through his days numb. A pre-recorded video message arrives from his old friend Dr. Gibarian, Chief Scientist on the Prometheus, a research station orbiting the planet Solaris. Gibarian sounds afraid. He asks Kelvin specifically to come. The corporation that owns the mission has lost contact and is sending Kelvin out as a one-man rescue and assessment.

Kelvin arrives at the Prometheus to find it eerily quiet, with blood on the corridors. Gibarian is dead by suicide. Of the remaining crew, Dr. Snow is hiding in his cabin acting jumpy and evasive; Dr. Gordon refuses to come out of hers entirely. A child runs through the corridors when Kelvin's back is turned. Neither will say what's happening, only that he should sleep, and then he'll understand.

Kelvin sleeps. He wakes to find his wife Rheya sitting at the foot of his bunk, alive, exactly as he remembers her — and confused about how she got there. She has no memory of being dead. Snow and Gordon, watching from the corridor, confirm what they couldn't say: Solaris reads sleeping minds and constructs physical visitors from the memories the dreamer most cannot let go of. The visitors are not exactly the originals; they're projections — but they are sentient, they have bodies, they bleed.

Kelvin panics. He tricks this first Rheya into an escape pod and launches her into space, killing her. He sleeps again the next cycle. Rheya is there again when he wakes, just as before. Solaris doesn't accept being refused. The visitors come back, version after version, drawn from whatever the planet finds in him.

Kelvin stops trying to get rid of her. Over days the two of them build something resembling a marriage again — long conversations, sex, shared meals — even as Rheya grows aware of what she is. She knows she has no childhood except the fragments Kelvin remembers; she knows her body is wrong; she knows she can't be killed conventionally. Meanwhile Snow's behavior remains off — small inconsistencies, things he shouldn't know about Solaris, an alertness that doesn't match his stated panic.