


Metadata and artwork from TMDB. Not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
psychological
2002 · PG-13 · 1h 39m
How far will you go for a second chance?
A haunted psychologist. A mysterious planet.
After receiving a personal plea from an old friend stationed at the orbital research vessel Prometheus, psychologist Chris Kelvin travels to the planet Solaris to find out what has happened to its crew. The station is half-empty, the survivors aren't talking, and the planet below is doing something to everyone who sleeps in its orbit. Steven Soderbergh's quiet, melancholy adaptation of Stanisław Lem's novel about grief, memory, and the cost of asking the wrong question.
Tags
Based on 1 rating
6.7
Overall
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.
Gordon plays back a recording Gibarian made before killing himself. He had come to the same realization Kelvin is approaching: the visitors are not their loved ones, no matter how convincing. They are Solaris using human grief against the human host. Gibarian's own visitor had been his dead son. He couldn't keep doing it. Gordon has built a "Higgs device" that can neutralize the matter Solaris uses to construct the visitors. She wants to use it. She wants out.
Rheya overhears Gordon and Kelvin debating. She understands what she is, and she understands that as long as she exists Kelvin will never come home. While Kelvin sleeps she goes to Gordon and asks Gordon to use the Higgs device on her. She wants to free Kelvin from her. Gordon does it. Rheya dissolves. Kelvin wakes to find her gone again, this time permanently. The grief redoubles.
Cornered, Snow admits what's been wrong. The real Dr. Snow died early in the visitor outbreak. The Snow Kelvin has been talking to is a visitor — Snow's own copy, projected from Snow's memories, who killed the original out of self-preservation and has been impersonating him to anyone who arrived. He isn't malicious; he's frightened. He's been hiding, like everyone else.
Solaris's gravitational pull intensifies. The Prometheus's orbit decays; the station will be pulled into the planet within hours. Gordon makes for the escape shuttle and demands Kelvin come with her. Kelvin walks her to the airlock. Then he stops at the threshold. He doesn't leave. Gordon launches without him.
The film closes ambiguous and quiet. Kelvin is in his Earth apartment again — same kitchen, same light. He cuts his hand on a knife and the wound closes instantly. Rheya is there, herself but also not herself, present in a way she never was on Earth. His son, dead in life as well, is there too. The station has been consumed by Solaris and Kelvin with it. Whether this is afterlife, projection, or something else is left open. They are home, and they will not be coming back.
More Like This
Reviews
No reviews yet. Be the first.