The Shining in outer space. Even better, the unheralded inspiration behind Eraserhead . Not unlike Stanley Kubrick's mountaintop hotel, the space station in Solaris is a place of no return, where nothing is as it ought to be. Furtive figures dart across its ominous corridors at vision's edge. Dead people walk and talk.
Imaginary friends materialize.
But at the end of day Kubrick still had Stephen King's ghost story to tell. David Lynch was determined to fracture narrative conventions. A story slowly arises in both films, but with protagonists stepping in and out of disparate but overlapping states of reality, the plot contours become discernable when viewed at a distance rather than closeup, like a pointillist painting rather than Renaissance portraiture. Of course The Shining and Eraserhead were in the future when Tarkovsky transformed a Russian science-fiction novel into one of his most memorable movies. References to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy stud the terse dialogue, which ruminates on the meaning of love and science, truth and deception, and provides no pop quiz answers.