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Blindness
Miramax Films


6.9

based on 31 reviews
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based on 32 votes
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MPAA RATING: R for violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity.

Starring Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal, Sandra Oh, and Danny Glover

It begins in a flash, as one man is instantaneously struck blind while driving home from work, his whole world suddenly turned to an eerie, milky haze. One by one, each person he encounters – his wife, his doctor, even the seemingly good Samaritan who gives him a lift home – will in due course suffer the same unsettling fate. As the contagion spreads, and panic and paranoia set in across the city, newly blind victims of the “White Sickness” are rounded up and quarantined within a crumbling, abandoned mental asylum, where all semblance of ordinary life begins to break down. (Miramax Films)

GENRE(S):	Drama \| Mystery \| Romance \| Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	Don McKellar
DIRECTED BY:	Fernando Meirelles
RELEASE DATE:	Theatrical: October 3, 2008
RUNNING TIME:	120 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	Canada \| Brazil \| Japan
LANGUAGE(S):	English \| Japanese

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White

Meirelles adds another perspective, that the epidemic might be a good thing if, by being thrown into the darkness together, we may once again recognize the human family to which we all belong.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

It's a rattling, heartrending performance (Moore) in, yes, a long, hard slough of a film – one that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

It engaged me throughout and I found the ending to be surprisingly hopeful.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

At times almost unbearably ugly, but by the time you walk out of the theater, you know you've seen something.

Portland Oregonian Stan Hall

Visually nervy, beautifully acted, intense and philosophically compelling, it struggles to connect emotionally as it wrestles with the challenging source material.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

A perversely enjoyable, occasionally harrowing adaptation of José Saramago's 1995 disaster allegory.

New York Post Kyle Smith

I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

It's more like a filmed allegory.

Empire Staff (Not credited)

Handicapped by pretensions to making big statements, Blindness is still gripping, disturbing and intermittently powerful.

NPR Bob Mondello

Moore is always watchable, Ruffalo and Bernal get a nice rivalry going without ever establishing eye contact (as it were), and Danny Glover has some nice moments in an underdeveloped part as an older man who finds, to his benefit, that love is blind.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

As the players enact the fall and rebirth of civilization, Meirelles suggests that even a society gone to hell looks better with a little music-video-like pizzazz.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

There's a good movie here, but we get it in pieces that are sometimes hard to decipher.

USA Today Claudia Puig

A brilliant idea that seems to lack the vision to be great.

Washington Post Neely Tucker

An arresting, often riveting film that is fascinating to look at but not nearly so interesting to watch.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Not a great film, mainly because it can't transcend -- and, indeed, lays bare -- the intellectual flimsiness of its source. But it is, nonetheless, full of examples of what good filmmaking looks like. For all its chin-rubbing, brow-furrowing attitudes, it does not, in the end, give you much to think about. But there is, nonetheless, a lot here to see.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Blindness is provocative cinema. But it also is predictable cinema: It startles but does not surprise.

Variety Justin Chang

Meirelles' slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago's prose.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Murky and grainy, and showing human beings at their grimmest - thievery, rape, betrayal, murder - Blindness is no barrel of laughs. But it IS a barrel of pretentious metaphorical musings.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

This film is very different: chilly, methodical, a slave to 10-ton metaphor as opposed to metaphoric provocation.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

For all its pretension and artiness, Blindness is more like M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" (which at least had the decency to be fast-paced and short), right down to its upbeat and inane conclusion.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

You get the film's message, that mankind does not react well when challenged by unpleasantness it can't explain away, within the first 15 minutes -- leaving more than 100 minutes to ponderously belabor the point.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

The trouble with Blindness is that it’s so preoccupied with shouldering this symbolic weight that it gradually forgets to tell a story--to keep faith with the directives of common sense.

Village Voice Anthony Kaufman

Unflinching at best and treacly at worst, the film unveils its apocalyptic scenario with visceral intensity, but lacks the emotional sophistication to rise above schadenfreude kicks.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

An extended metaphor for the condition of man, and boy is it extended. In the course of two hours that crawl by like four and a half.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Blindness is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

A feel-nothing movie – a series of disconnected, implausible incidents that end as arbitrarily as they began, in an effort to inspire emotions the picture never justifies.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

What was presumably intended to play like a fable plays, instead, like an overly long car commercial crossed with a scare-mongering public service announcement.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

After a powerful opening, when we see the first victim suddenly go blind while driving in traffic, the film devolves into a dystopian freak show and wastes many wonderful performers, including Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore.

New York Daily News Staff (Not credited)

Piles on the indignities, violence and island-of-man turmoil.

Film Threat Matthew Sorrento

The able cast can't swim through the muck.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

This ends on an uplifting and philosophical note, equating moral blindness with the literal sort, which you'll probably appreciate if you haven't already slit your wrists.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.9 (out of 10) based on 32 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Holly R. gave it an8:
This movie was a good study of human behavior when people become vulnerable and helpless. It is a study of human character under a crisis. If you are interested in psychology and/or human nature, you will quite like this movie. I liked the way it was filmed (stark) and felt it was a powerful movie. (I have a degree in psychology and love Sci-Fi.) Julianne Moore did a great job!

Sean gave it a4:
Difficult slog. The descent into moral depravity was too quick, too easy, too unbelievable to be explained by mere blindness. Too many people standing idly by when EVERYTHING about their situation should have demanded more strident action, more intelligent and more organized a response. I felt frustrated and angered by the patheticness of it all--even the incomprehensible inability of the soldiers to respond in a minimally meaningful or conciliatory fashion was pointlessly baffling. This is a movie where the details felt entirely disingenuous and ridiculous, as if every possible Orwellian fault was systematically exposed before being played to the hilt. Somehow, though, the overall setting/plot device somehow managed to remain both plausible and quite strong in its impact. Some solid acting saved this for me... but still nothing stellar. A week later and I didn't think of it once until I was reminded of it on this site. It could have been great had real people been blinded instead of a loose conglomeration of hypothetical constructs.

Chad S. gave it a7:
This happening is steeped in literary origins; one by one, big city denizens are embroiled in an epidemic of mass blindness, a condition that's symptomatic of an all-encompassing commonality: The world is going blind. "Blindness", the Nobel Prize-winning novel by Jose Saramengo, in spite of its heightened language and scope, like Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale", is unmistakably a work of speculative fiction, which becomes more readily apparent with this servicable adaptation that probably does a disservice to the celebrated Portugese writer, since the film invites easy comparisons to M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" and Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later". "Blindness" plays out like an art house B-picture. In place of blind people, insert zombies; while the zombies are blind to their own humanity, some of the quarantined people at the staging area are blind to inhumanity, as the King of Ward Three(Gael Garcia Bernal) and his minions, pillage the food and rape the women. Thankfully, the filmmaker is mindful of Sarmengo's literary pedigree; he resists the temptation to put his own stamp on the material, unlike an egotist such as Shyamalan, who given the opportunity to adapt "Blindness", might have provided his own adducement behind this inexplicable outbreak of spontaneous unseeing, and transform the Saramengo novel into a tree happening. This laborious, but passionate piece of filmmaking, coaxes science fiction out from the narrative's closet, much to the chagrin of the Nobel Prize committee. It's the Richard Matheson short story reimagined as "I Am Blind".

Brandon B gave it a1:
Really messed up rape scene. It was literally the worst movie ever. I would like to punch the director in the face for wasting my time. It's all so clear why people pirate movies..movies like this really don't help their cause.

Aidan W gave it a1:
This movie was garbage. From the terrible dialogue to lame 'drama' it failed all over. The characters were not gripping. The story was poorly transcribed to the screen. The blind protested this for the wrong reason, not because it's offensive to the blind, but because it's offensive anyone who paid money to see this.

Carol gave it a0:
One of the absolutely worst movies I've seen. I almost (and should have) walked out. No explanation for anything in a movie which debases everything and everyone.

Michael S. gave it an8:
Fernando Meirelles' ambitious film "BLINDNESS" aims for Oscar contention, but is more realistically going to end up a cult classic in the near future. Many will hate it, some will love it. I'd say it's an 8/10.

Blindness Miramax Films

Blindness
Miramax Films