Regarding his landmark 1961 novel Solaris, Stanisław Lem stated multiple times that his goal was to depict the impossibility of human contact with a truly alien intelligence. He created a planet with a sentient ocean, and after humans in an orbiting space station bombard it with radiation, it responds by raiding their subconsciouses and sending “visitors” made of their own memories who look and act human but have no knowledge of their origins. Kris Kelvin, our protagonist, is visited by his late wife, and has to wrestle with all the issues that generates.

Lem’s novel is told in the first person by Kelvin, which gives us all the other characters at an emotional remove. Thus his wife (named Harey in the audiobook, Rheya in the print edition) is as real to him as Kris’s fellow scientists Snaut and Sartorius (I swear I am not making up these names), which makes her intriguing, as a returning dead wife should be, but not an overwhelming presence who unbalances the story. Kris doesn’t exactly wax rhapsodic about her, and the other scientists see her as a dangerous alien presence, as they do their own visitors (who we never meet). In a sense, since Kris tells us this story, he’s the only “real” person we encounter, and we have to take his word (as we do in all first-person tales) that he’s relaying information accurately.

Kelvin may be the protagonist, but his late wife is really the linchpin of the story, around which everything, even Kelvin, revolves. Long before the advent of Ellen Ripley, when women in SF movies were relegated to “yankee” roles (the man, the “yanker,” grabs her hand and pulls her after him to escape the alien/monster/villain), the three film versions of Lem’s novel gave us a fully realized female protagonist who affects everything and everyone. Without her, Lem’s story has no emotional core.¹

The first of the three versions is a 1968 Russian two-part TV movie (hereafter called S68); the second, an acknowledged classic by Andrei Tarkovsky from 1972 (S72); and finally a 2002 American version by Steven Soderbergh (S02). And each presents its own version of Kelvin’s late wife, even to the point of giving her different names. Which is best? That’s up to the viewer, although I will share my favorite. Please remember that I’m no expert, just a fan with opinions. As always, your mileage may vary.

SOLARIS (1968)

In her first screen incarnation (S68) she is called Harey, and played by Antonina Pilyus as a young—very young—woman, even though the actress herself was 21. Since we learn the real Harey died by suicide ten years earlier, it makes sense that Kelvin would be more mature, but honestly, as played here by Vasily Lanovoy, he doesn’t seem a decade older than Pilyus even though he was. There’s the same issue in S02, but more on that shortly.

More significantly, especially in light of the later films, Harey is simply…well, a girl. We know she is an alien construct from the git-go, and at some point she becomes aware of it as well, but she remains at heart a simple Russian girl. For Lem’s novel, this is fine, and even in this film, it serves its purpose, and Pilyus does a fine job being…well, a girl. If we’re meant to fall in love with her like Kelvin does, then it’s a matter of personal taste. But she spends her time tidying up, reading fashion magazines (on a space station!), and generally doing all the stereotypical things young women were expected to do.

Pilyus, and any actor playing Harey, has a tough job because they’re not really playing Harey; they’re playing Kelvin’s memory of Harey, which means that her suicidal ideation is baked into her. She is doomed, in other words, to re-enact her death, but because she’s a neutrino construct and not a human being, each time she dies, she returns. That’s the horror of these visitors: You can’t get shed of them. No matter what you do, the next time you fall asleep (which is when the ocean rifles through your subconscious), your visitor reappears, with no memory of having been there before.

Harey may start as a copy, but she doesn’t stay that way. The more she’s around Kris, the greater her sense of individuality. Eventually she both accepts what she is (and isn’t) and decides on her own to allow Snaut and Sartorius to zap her out of existence with a new gizmo they’ve created. This is the only adaptation where that is actually shown, and even though the budget prevents any special effects, the scene—as a whining sound effect grows louder, she walks around a hallway corner and disappears, and only her scarf comes blowing back—is very effective.

So in this first version of Lem’s novel, we’re presented with a Harey who, based on her apparent age, must have been Kelvin’s first love, and who killed herself after an argument, altering the entire course of Kelvin’s life. In this sense, she’s the opposite of a manic pixie dream girl: Rather, she’s a mopey ghost nightmare girl, who starts as a mere embodiment of memory and ends as, if not entirely human, at least independent enough to choose her own fate.

(We also never see the actual planet Solaris, just noir-ish light effects through windows. That will be remedied in S72 and S02).

You can watch this version on YouTube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1tnAyARsmA&t=3246s

SOLARIS (1972)

Four years later, Andrei Tarkovsky brought us the definitive Hari (as it’s spelled here) in his widescreen epic version (S72). Lem’s novel and S68 both begin with Kelvin’s arrival on the Solaris space station, but Tarkovsky starts with a forty-five-minute interlude on Earth as Kelvin prepares for his mission. If you know Tarkovsky, you know what that entails, including the wordless five-minute driving scene through 1971 Tokyo standing in for “the city of the future.”

This is also where we get our first look at Hari, in a photo that Kelvin seems about to burn, along with accumulated personal papers, before his flight to Solaris. We don’t know who she is yet, but it’s our first look at Natalya Bondarchuk in the role. She was nineteen at the time of filming, and it’s safe to assume Hari was supposed to be around the same age. In both films so far, she’s depicted as almost a child bride, which makes her tragic suicide that much more poignant (and to be fair, her relationship with the mature Kelvin in the film a tad unsettling).

(Natalya was also the daughter of Sergei Bondarchuk, who directed the massive five-hour War and Peace film, and who became Tarkovsky’s professional nemesis.)

Thanks to this prologue, by the time Kelvin gets to Solaris, we’ve gotten to know him as a distant, analytical psychologist who’s been sent to decide if the station should be shut down (in Lem and S68, he’s just another researcher assigned to the station). As played by Donatas Banionis, he’s impassive and weary, with a shock of white hair in his bangs and a middle-aged dad bod. And yet this makes his reactions, as low-key as they are, far more profound than the Kelvin of S68. Because of this, his interactions with Hari somehow resonate more deeply. This was the love of his life, and he lost her; her return rattles him in every sense.

The plot is essentially the same, although the budget stretched to amazing space station sets and crude but effective shots of the actual planet. Hari’s first appearance is similar in some ways to S68: In both, Kelvin wakes to see her against a window that overlooks the sentient ocean. But S68 just gives us a bar of light across her eyes, while Tarkovsky shows us her lips and chin bathed in the amber glow coming through the window, and keeps her backlit for the first part of her entrance. We connect this mysterious woman with the burned-up picture thanks to the shawl she wears, and it makes sense that, having (relatively) just seen that picture, Kris’s memory of her would be of that image.

Unlike S68, this Hari is immediately, clearly, not human in her behavior. She doesn’t even recognize a picture of herself until she catches sight of a mirror. Her dress has laces up the back but there’s no seam because Kris’s memory didn’t contain it, and she has to be cut out of it. She knows Kris, but has no idea where they are or how they got there.

As in all three versions, her arrival freaks Kris out so much that he tricks her into a shuttle rocket and blasts her into space. He gets burned by the rocket exhaust, and while treating his injuries Snaut explains about the visitors, and that Hari will return the next time Kris sleeps. By the time that happens, Kris has rethought his earlier freakout, and welcomes her with a warm embrace.

Bondarchuk is simply wonderful in the role. Her anguish is palpable, and her growing self-realization is presented with sympathy and insight. At one point she gazes at a print of The Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and the sound of the depicted events gradually reaches us, demonstrating her dawning humanity. But with that humanity comes the realization of what she actually is, and it’s significant that directly following the scene with the painting, which seems hopeful and optimistic, she tries to kill herself by drinking liquid oxygen. The self-destructiveness is just too strong to resist.

Given their visible age difference (Bondarchuk was 19, Banionis, 48) the “child bride” issue is still present, but because Bondarchuk is so good, and her character so much richer, it’s not as distracting as in S68. But because she’s so good, it takes the whole relationship into a deeper, more emotional level, one that prompted author Lem to say with disapproval, “the book was entitled Solaris and not Love in Outer Space.”

You can watch this version on YouTube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ZhQPaw4rE&t=2473s

SOLARIS (2002)

If Lem disliked Tarkovsky’s version and its emphasis on relationships, he must’ve had a full-on conniption fit if he saw Steven Soderbergh’s “love conquers all” take on his story. A full hour shorter than S72, S02 stars George Clooney as Kris Kelvin and Natascha McElhone as Rheya, an anagram of “Harey” (he also changed the other scientists’ names: Sartorius becomes “Gordon,” and Snaut becomes “Snow”).

Through flashbacks, we get to see a lot of Kelvin and Rheya’s past as they meet cute on a train, meet again at a party, have sex for the first time, discuss families while they eat Chinese food naked, and talk poetry (Dylan Thomas’s “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” functions both as something Kelvin quotes to impress her, and her suicide note). There’s ultimately no mystery left to Rheya, either the real woman or the replica, by the time the movie ends, and even the enigmatic Solaris turns out to have a case of the warm fuzzies.

McElhone does a good job with what she’s given, but the wholly pedestrian take on the story does her no favors. McElhone and Clooney also appear roughly contemporary in age, which removes the “young bride” element from the novel and the two previous versions. If Clooney is supposed to be ten years older than her, he’s very well-preserved, even though he is exactly ten years older.

The biggest change comes at the climax. In S68, like the novel, Kelvin decides to stay on the station and continue working on attempts to contact the ocean. In S72, Solaris gives Kelvin a chance to reconcile with a “visitor” version of his stern father. But in S02, we get what I can only describe as a happy ending, where Solaris somehow draws Kelvin into a reality with Rheya, and when he asks (reasonably) if he’s dead, she replies, “We don’t have to think that way anymore.” Cue the embrace, fade to black.

You can watch this version on any mainstream streaming service, if you pay to rent it.

 

CONCLUSION

Of course, the best version is Tarkovsky’s S72. It’s a benchmark, a classic, and a film that almost infinitely rewards rewatching. S68 is fine for what it is, Lem’s story filtered through a visual sense very similar to William Hartnell-era Doctor Who, while S02, like most remakes, just leaves a viewer who’s seen S72 wondering what was the point. And from my perspective, that best version also has the best Hari, a complex and ultimately tragic figure who finally embraces her own nature and does what’s necessary to help Kelvin move on. So you could say this Mopey Ghost Nightmare Girl, like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, exists just to help a man overcome his problems. But when you watch S72, you realize that this Hari brings so much more to the story, and for that reason, she remains my pick for the best.

 

¹           As I was writing this, I was suddenly struck by the parallels between the onscreen relationship of Kelvin and his replicant wife, and Decker and the Ilia-probe from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I’ve never seen it discussed anywhere, although it may have been. In both cases, the returning “ghost” of the dead partner serves as the only point of contact between humans and an alien intelligence.

© 2026 Alex Bledsoe