Kris Kelvin, Donatas Banionis, a psychologist, is poised for an interstellar mission to Solaris to decide whether the decades‑old research station circling a vast ocean world should continue. He spends his last day on Earth with his elderly father and a retired pilot named Burton. Years earlier, Burton had joined an exploratory team at Solaris but was recalled after reporting unsettling sightings, including a four‑meter‑tall child on the planet’s surface of the water. A panel of scientists and military personnel dismissed these visions as hallucinations, yet the remaining crew members now report similarly strange phenomena. Before departure, Burton confides that he recognizes the child’s face as someone who was orphaned when a Solaris explorer vanished.
Upon arrival at the Solaris station, Kelvin finds the outpost in disarray. Dr. Gibarian, Sos Sargsyan, has killed himself, and the two surviving crew members—Dr. Snaut Jüri Järvet and Dr. Sartorius Anatoliy Solonitsyn—are increasingly unstable. Kelvin also glimpses figures who were not part of the original crew. Gibarian has left a cryptic farewell video urging Kelvin to trust what he is experiencing, showing two appearances of a little girl and insisting he is not insane; if strange things occur, it will not be Kelvin’s fault.
That night, Hari Natalya Bondarchuk, Kelvin’s wife who died ten years earlier, materializes in his sleeping quarters. He is terrified, and in a moment of desperation he launches a replica of his wife into space. Snaut explains that the visitors, or “guests,” began appearing after the scientists conducted radiation experiments aimed at the swirling surface of Solaris, in a desperate bid to understand its nature.
Later, Hari returns again, this time with a steadier presence. Kelvin accepts her and they fall asleep together, but when he briefly leaves, she panics and injures herself trying to escape. Before long, Snaut and Sartorius tell Kelvin that Hari is not the real person but a being crafted from his memories of his wife. She thinks and feels as if she were human, yet she is not, and Sartorius suggests that the visitors might be fragile but dangerous beings that could be destroyed with a device called “the annihilator.” In a later discussion, Snaut even proposes beaming Kelvin’s brainwave patterns at Solaris to help it understand him and halt the disturbances.
As Hari grows more autonomous, she learns the truth about the original Hari’s suicide ten years earlier. The scientists gather to confront the mystery in a birthday‑party setting that devolves into a philosophical debate, with Sartorius reminding Hari that she is a memory, not a person who truly exists. Overwhelmed, Hari drinks liquid oxygen and dies again, only to experience a painful, immediate resurrection. On the planet’s surface, the ocean swirls faster, forming a funnel that hints at a looming encounter with Solaris itself.
Kelvin falls ill and dreams of his mother, a young woman who tends to his arm. When he wakes, Hari is gone; Snaut reads Hari’s farewell note, in which she explains she asked for destruction. Snaut adds that broadcasting Kelvin’s brainwaves into Solaris has caused the visitors to stop appearing, and islands begin to form on the planet’s surface. Kelvin contemplates whether to return to Earth or stay with the crew.
In the film’s surreal final act, Kelvin appears to be at a family home from the past, where he embraces his father. The image slowly shifts, revealing that the setting is in fact one of Solaris’s islands, leaving the truth open to interpretation and inviting contemplation about memory, guilt, and the nature of humanity. The island‑bound ending lingers, suggesting that consciousness and longing can shape reality just as surely as science does.
