Blindness (Fernando Meirelles, 2008)

In an unspecified city, people start losing their sight in a flash and no cause is found. The epidemic spreads and quarantine centres are set up in the spreading panic. One woman retains her sight in the midst of the contaminated and chooses to hide this to stay with her husband, an eye specialist.

Once you know that Meirelles was behind City of God, a viscerally masterful exploration of the brutality of life in Brazil's favelas, a lot of what follows can only be viewed through that filter: the quarantined detainees swiftly become brutalised by their helpless situation and then by their prison confinement as a group of males amongst them go feral, ignored by a terrified government. It has uncomfortable echoes from early on of Carandiru, Hector Babenco's telling of the mass murder that occurred in an overcrowded and out-of-control Sao Paulo prison.

This is not science fiction: Meirelles is not interested in the causes of the blindness or finding a cure, only in how it can be used as a metaphor of disempowerment. To be frank he never really gets to the bottom of what his metaphor means, or how much of it is a metaphor, and so by the end we're still rather left in the dark as to what we're to have understood by it. But it's easy to forgive a lot in the light of what Meirelles does accomplish: there are stretches along the way which drip with insight into the human psyche and power relationships, and some of the images of desolation take the breath away without lapsing into pornography, which really requires a fine balancing act from a director.

7/10