Click to play videoCast: Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Julianne Moore
Direction: Fernando Meirelles
It's difficult to explain just how unsettling a film Blindness is. Based on Nobel Prize-winning Portugese author Jose Saramago's best-selling novel, it's meant to be a thought-provoking metaphor for the condition of man, but it's actually a dreary drama that tests the patience of its audience.
The film's about a mysterious epidemic of blindness that engulfs an entire city; and it focuses on a group of people quarantined in a deserted hospital. Mark Ruffalo stars as a doctor who tries to organise the inmates of this facility into a supportive society, while Gael Garcia Bernal plays the stubborn bully who takes control of the food supply and institutes a system of gangsterism, demanding first valuables, then women as payment for allowing the rest to eat.
The only person who seems immune to this bizarre plague is the doctor's wife, played by Julianne Moore, who loyally accompanies him to this facility and becomes the caretaker of this desperate, helpless group.
The message of this film is clear as crystal – humans don't necessarily unite in suffering.
Faced with hardship and even illness, they're more likely to turn against one another, their worst instincts coming to the fore. It's only when they accept that love and kindness and a sense of community make life worth living, do they regain their chance to "see" again.
Despite its best intentions, Blindness doesn't work. It's an unpleasant experience just sitting through the film, watching with despair the sickening degradation most characters must go through. Women being raped, men being bludgeoned to death, people defecating where they eat – this is not an easy watch.
Directed by City of God's Fernando Meirelles, this film doesn't hurt just because of the violence, but because it is merciless and doesn't spare a thought for its audience. It's also crushingly slow and seems to go on and on till you can take it no more.
A terrific premise that translates poorly to the screen, Blindness fails because it lacks the vision to be truly eye-opening. At best two out of five for Blindness; this film isn't for the faint-hearted, go in armed with enough patience.
Rating: 2 / 5 (Average)
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