The film’s ensemble cast features Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael García Bernal and Danny Glover and is the fourth feature from Fernando Meirelles, the director of ‘City of God’ and ‘The Constant Gardener’. It’s a contained, theatrical set-up that allows for the interior intensity of a ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ coupled with a ‘Lord of the Flies’ approach to exploring the values and behaviour of a community in crisis. ‘Blindness’ is a slick and murky adaptation of Portuguese writer José Saramago’s allegorical novel about a city which is devastated by a plague of blindness: one by one the citizens of an anonymous metropolis lose their sight and so the government sees fit to quarantine a frightened group of victims in a disused mental hospital.
