Deliberately paced Soviet movie version of Stanislaw Lem's novel. A psychologist travels to the troubled research station orbiting the planet Solaris, only to fall prey to the same phenomenon he's investigating: the planet's sentient ocean is somehow manifesting very solid recreations of people from the scientist's pasts... in the case of the psychologist, his wife, now dead for the past 10 years.

The movie becomes not only a rumination of the power of grief, but calls into question what it is to be human, and man's total inability to embrace the unknown. Heady stuff, true science fiction.