Stalker is one of the strangest movies ever made, and equally hard to describe to someone who hasn’t seen it: some guys walk around in the woods for about two hours, exchanging deadly serious quips about theology and the nature of the subconscious, and when they finally get where they’re going, they realize they didn’t want to go there after all, and then it rains on-screen for about six minutes while they sit quietly and then they go home. Riveting.

It’s also one of the most beautiful and moving experiences ever put to film, and probably Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s most well-known movie, or at least the one with the greatest cultural resonance for Western audiences. The sense of alienation, otherness, and quiet dread that define the movie’s setting (its abandoned and almost featureless Zone), are among the most widely shared experiences of contemporary life.

But how can you begin to criticize a movie that expends so much effort to not be clearly definable, to not be anything like an object for critical examination? The Zone that drives the movie’s plot (practically its entire world) is little more than a boundary on a map—all the movie does to show the transition from outside to inside the Zone is move from sepia to color once the characters cross over. How is an audience supposed to believe that the movie is valuable, that the experience is worth having, when its elevator pitch is such a hard sell?

Jonathan Hoel threads the needle with his short book on Tarkovsky’s work: treat the reader and the movie with equal charity, and take your time describing the action of the plot and the context of its creation. That alone is worth about 120 pages of reading and leaves a lot of room to persuade viewers who might otherwise treat the movie as just another self-indulgent academic project from an era of unaccountable auteurs and skewed critical standards.

Crucially, this is not just a book for film buffs. There’s plenty of trivia here, and you’ll be a lot of fun at parties regurgitating the details of Tarkovsky’s beef with various cultural organs of the USSR, incompetent editors, and the critical sensibilities of the age overall—but the book takes a careful approach to the value of cinema itself, and isn’t concerned with gatekeeping or the clout that comes from obscure movie knowledge. Hoel’s book is careful to balance quotes from intellectuals with a plain examination of what’s on the screen (aided by in-line illustrated renditions of key stills): it’s more important for the book to clearly define and understand the characters and their actions as portrayed by the camera than to rehash the discourse on genre or unearth the creator’s intentions. Not that this takes away from the book’s depth: later chapters challenge readers and viewers to reexamine the presence of poetry throughout Stalker and to ask which aspects of the movie rely on a poetic rather than a purely narrative sequence.

As a short introduction to Tarkovsky’s movies, the book will give new viewers a real head start. For committed fans, the book promises a new perspective on one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic aesthetic experiences. Whichever place you’re coming from, it should take you somewhere new and give you a good reason to watch or re-watch a movie that’ll really make you appreciate dogs, trains, religious icons, barbed wire, rotary telephones, nuclear power plant disasters, and overgrown concrete in a whole new way.

Disclaimer: Brett Belcastro is listed as an acknowledgment in the book and is a former colleague of the author but has no connection to the writing, publication, or distribution of the book.