Perfect in Weakness

Three men go on a risky journey through a forbidden Zone in search of fulfillment. They fail. They come home. The end.

The plot of Tarkovsky's Stalker is a joke.

Taking its title from 2 Corinthians, Perfect in Weakness explores Stalker as a ludic parable. And the subject of this parable is faith. Faith as folly, faith as a dangerous, last-ditch attempt to attain the unattainable. To fail, to fail again, and to carry on regardless.

Stalker is about crossing borders, boundaries, conventions. To transgress, to disrupt, to deconstruct is the dark impulse behind Tarkovsky's personal vision. It is also the illicit, revolutionary message at the heart of the gospel: tear down this temple, and have faith.

Like one of Deleuze's rhizomes, or David Tracy's fragments, Perfect in Weakness aims to throw out thoughts, ideas, and connections in unexpected (even unintended) directions, drawing new and unlikely texts into the field of film theology--Patristic thought, Christian Neoplatonism, and Renaissance literature.

Perfect in Weakness suggests we see cinema itself as the ultimate apocalyptic art form--letting light into the darkness, and then throwing it on a screen.


""Heber-Percy's illuminating scholarship, boundary-dissolving methodology, and academic poetics deliver a fascinating journey into the soul of Tarkovsky's Stalker. Perfect in Weakness not only challenges and enriches our understanding of this mesmerizing cinematic achievement, it provides a unique appreciation of the nature of conversion and the life religious. For Heber-Percy the film is a heartfelt hymn whose meaning is in the conversation it provokes. This book is a provocative, fecund, and moving contribution to that conversation, and to that meaning.""
--Britt Harrison, Lecturer, Goldsmiths, University of London

""The unexamined life is not worth living, and neither is the disconnected one. Colin Heber-Percy's integration of film, ancient wisdom, and Christian theology makes a revealing and profoundly attractive account of contemporary spirituality. This is a book for explorers of what it is to be honest, engaged, and fully human.""
--Nicholas Holtam, Bishop of Salisbury

""Deeply impressive, Heber-Percy's writing is deeply serious, informed with passion, but always he pursues his quest with a lightness of touch and playfulness. Here is an original thinker offering rigor and insight.""
--Madeleine Bunting, writer and former associate editor of The Guardian


Colin Heber-Percy is a fulltime screenwriter and a priest in the Church of England. His screenwriting work (mainly for television, and mainly historical drama) has won many awards and been shown all over the world. He lectures and publishes on spirituality, faith, film, and fiction.