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Foreword: I didn't care much for Solaris upon its release, but then, neither did most of its audience, or most of the critics; nor was I much of a fan of Soderbergh, anyway, and besides, Stanislaw Lem detested it. Solaris stuck in the back of my mind, though - particularly in the wake of The Fountain, which I consider a strong sister film - and I eventually got around to reconsidering the film on DVD. It has aged for me magnificently.

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Imagine there is a place where your perceptions can be made real. In a sense, you already live in this place. Right now, you are orbiting a world and traveling a time line, and the things you take for "real" are merely the chemical manifestations of your perceptions of this orbit, this world, this time line.

Now imagine, for example, that you are on a ship, and you perceive an iceberg. As you've known for most of your life, what you immediately perceive - a minor mountain of white ice, sitting silently above the surface of the sea - is not the full scope of the iceberg. There is a great deal more beneath the water, which you cannot perceive. If you do not perceive it, can you discard it? Of course not. If you somehow magically removed the 80% of an iceberg that sits below the water, the 20% currently above would sink.

Now back to the place where your perceptions can be made real. If something you have perceived in the past - say, a person - could be made real in front of you, would it be the same person that you knew? No, not really. Like the iceberg, all the people you know, no matter how well you know them, have a lot of ice floating under the surface of the water. The construct standing before you is made only of your perceptions, i.e. only of the ice above the water. It's going to sink.

This is of course what Soderbergh's Solaris is about, and briskly; it is a 90-minute movie which leaves an enormous amount of material under the surface of the water, suggesting only small fragments. From perfunctory lines of dialogue or momentary glances, we can gather that Chris Kelvin is a psychologist, and that he is no longer invested in his job. We can gather that he loved his wife, Rhea, and that she committed suicide, and he feels responsible for her death. We can gather that Gibarian is an important friend to Kelvin, because a single message from the man is enough to draw Kelvin to a space station orbiting a dreamlike space-ova.

As such, Solaris is brutally economical, and certainly the most precise film in Soderbergh's career. Everything is just so, and all the pieces form the kind of unity that comes of being your own writer, director, photographer, and editor. Had Soderbergh played Kelvin, the film would have adopted a moderately different tone, but not likely an invalid one.

Solaris is all about its tones, though. It is one of the most meticulously photographed science fiction movies I have ever seen. Its use of onscreen colour is superceded only by its crisp, intentional blocking. It recalls science fiction films of the Tarkovsky era in its rich, expressive lighting and inventive use of real-world construction to suggest future-world landscape. It employs, in the space station, a magnificent, and magnificently understated, set for the purpose of photography. Each angle has opportunity for claustrophobic detail immediately alongside powers-of-ten distance and depth.

Solaris is a film of sonic tones, too, and via those, emotional tones as well. Cliff Martinez's hypnotic and deeply unsettling score mates perfectly with the single-track audio design, where rooms and spaces are defined by single overriding white noises (a roaring air conditioner; a whirring computer compressor). These blend seamlessly back into the visuals again, dominated by the undulating, ephemeral, unresolvable Solaris itself, a carpet pool of pinks and magentas, and eventually flushed, aroused reds.

And in the center, the remorseless detachment of Natasha McElhone, who both can and cannot be entirely perceived, even while staring directly at us - directly into the camera - in profound, probing close-up. And Clooney, in his most vulnerable performance, around whom Soderbergh edits a plain and simple inevitability of ethos: of course he fucks her, of course he stops asking why. What we call our "walls" are actually our shields against the chasm beyond. Nothing is knowable.

As befits both Soderbergh and his producer, James Cameron, Solaris is entirely male in its gaze, and the futility of true human connection - and of the knowability of women, particularly - explores the deeper concern beneath, regarding the knowability of perception at all. It is the kind of neurotic shell game, a thought experiment for the too-clever and frighteningly depressed, at which Soderbergh excels. Solaris is a profoundly troubled, and troubling, film, an existential crisis bottled in glowing gems and long-forgotten sighs.