Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
When a sudden plague of blindness devastates a city, a small group of the afflicted band together to triumphantly overcome the horrific conditions of their imposed quarantine.
Blindness adapts José Saramago's allegorical novel with striking visual ambition — Fernando Meirelles uses overexposed, washed-out imagery to simulate the white blindness of the afflicted, creating a genuinely distinctive and unsettling aesthetic. The plot carries the novel's harrowing social commentary about civilization's fragility, though the transition from page to screen loses some of the prose's philosophical weight, leaving the narrative feeling uneven in its middle section. The ensemble cast — Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael García Bernal — performs solidly but not uniformly; some characters remain underdeveloped. The cinematography is the film's strongest asset, purposefully disorienting and thematically coherent. The ending, however, deflates rather than satisfies — the sudden restoration of sight feels abrupt and emotionally hollow, failing to deliver the cathartic or thought-provoking resolution the premise demands.