Rarely has a movie horrified me when there was hardly a drop of blood spilled. But BLINDNESS doesn't go for the vernacular - it goes for the brain.First off, it was by pure luck that I heard of this little independent feature. Odd that it hasn't met a bigger audience, considering its list of actors: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, and Alice Braga. It's based on the international best-seller by Jose Saramago.
As promised, here's a spoiler-free synopsis. Moore is the wife of Ruffalo, who is an eye doctor. Ruffalo treats a man who says he's gone blind, but instead of "dark" blindness, it's a form of "milky white" blindness.
This form is contageous, and soon the military are rounding up all the affected, including Ruffalo and Moore -- except Moore isn't really blind. She only tells the men she's blind so she can stay with her husband.
They're all taken to an abandoned mental hospital and literally dumped there to fend for themselves, with no nurses or doctors or even an attendant to help the newly blind. As more people are abandoned there, the hospital quickly becomes a microcosm of dog-eat-dog, may the strongest survive. The slow disintegration of humanity into the kind of filth and degredation that quickly rots inside the hospital is hard to watch, it's so realistic. And we get to witness it all through Moore's character's eyes, as she is the only person untouched by the blindness plague.
I will say that the movie has an upbeat ending, believe it or not. Still, I will be forever haunted by certain scenes. Be forewarned there is extreme brutality, including rape, and a lot of nudity.
BLINDNESS is not a movie about serial killers, zombies, or anything fantasy-driven. It is an apocalyptic scenario that could very well happen, and for that reason it's going to strike a chord in you that most horror movies fail to touch.
My recommendation:
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