Movie Review: Blindness

Blindness (2009) 

Directed by Fernando Meierelles

Written by Don McKellar

Starring Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Alice Braga, Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal

Release Date October 3rd, 2009 

Published October 10th, 2009 

Fernando Meierelles is an infinitely talented director whose features City of God and The Constant Gardener are breathtaking exercises in visual dynamism and urgent storytelling. It leaves one utterly baffled then to find Meirelles the director of Blindness; a dreary, sluggish horror story that features a plague nearly as curious as M. Night Shyamalan's evil oxygenating trees in The Happening.

Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo lead a diverse cast as a husband and wife. The husband is an opthamologist who is suddenly stricken blind. The previous day he had seen a patient who suffered the same affliction. Now the doctor is blind and so is his secretary and each of his patients. His wife however keeps her sight even as she joins her husband in a mass quarantine of people suddenly having been struck blind.

In the quarantine building, the blind are herded like cattle and kept like prisoners. The internal society starts off as expected, frightened but peaceful. Then chaos sets in. A despotic young man played by Diego Luna gets a hold of a weapon and takes the food hostage. He doles out rations in exchange for first jewelry and then sexual favors.

Meirelles observes these events with a bizarre distance, as if the chaos onscreen were an expression of his chaotic mindset. Even the director seems uncomfortable with the actions of his characters. This impression comes in the way Meirelles films the action through either too much darkness or too much light. If the director himself doesn't have the stomach for his action, how can he expect that of the audience?

This is the part of the review where I talk about the elements of the movie you might find most appealing beyond the premise and the technical creation that is the film. Unfortunately, Blindness is one of those rare movies where there really isn't anything appealing. Fernando Meirelles has crafted a thriller without thrills, a parable without underlying meaning. A sloppy, slow moving, dreary slog to a meaningless meandering ending.

What could I possibly recommend about that?

Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo are exceptionally talented people who no doubt were excited to work with a director of Meierelles' resume. That resume likely blinded them to the quality of Blindness, a mind numbing bore of a movie with less hope and exhilaration than even Eli Roth's lowest work. Rapes to murders to people defecating in the halls in service of a go nowhere plot, Blindness is a singularly horrific movie.