Solaris is a Russian science-fiction film, based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem, who was at that time the Soviet Union’s major science-fiction writer. It’s the story of a mission to the remote planet of Solaris, to find out what happened aboard a space station whose crew have disappeared - or almost disappeared, for there are a couple left: Snauth, a cybernetics expert who has turned to drink, and the biologist Dr Sartorius. Also on board the space station, it turns out, is the hero’s late wife, various dwarfs, and other eerie manifestations of a planet which is really a… ah, but that would be telling.