With its pedigree both in front of and behind the camera (not to mention the pedigree of the source material), Blindness has all the makings of a dystopian masterpiece, a resonant commentary on the dangerous underbelly of our supposedly stable society. Unfortunately, despite the wealth of talent involved, Blindness fails to connect in any meaningful way and makes for an almost unendurable viewing experience. It isn’t the subject matter, bleak though it is, that makes it this way, but the relentless ugliness, both literal and figurative, that makes it irredeemable. It begins promisingly enough but before the first hour is even up, it becomes excruciating to watch, a passionless orgy of all that is foul and wrong in human nature.

In an unnamed city an unnamed man (Yusuke Iseya) suddenly goes blind while driving his car. He’s taken to a doctor (Mark Ruffalo), who is baffled as he can find nothing physically wrong with the man. The following morning the doctor wakes to find that he, too, is now suffering from blindness and the affliction has spread to other people who came into contact with the man, credited variously as Thief (Don McKellar), Boy (Mitchell Nye), Woman with the Dark Glasses (Alice Braga), Man with the Black Eye Patch (Danny Glover), and First Blind Man’s Wife (Yoshina Kimura). The government takes decisive action, quarantining the blind in a former prison as doctors and scientists from around the world are convened to attempt to find the cause and the cure for the sudden blindness.

The blind – along with the Doctor’s Wife (Julianne Moore), who can see but is pretending to be blind in order to stay with her husband – are left to their own devices within the facility and the quality of life quickly degenerates. Feces and garbage litter the floors, people wander aimlessly through the hallways naked and filthy, and the optimism of the Doctor’s Wife is quickly eroded as she bears witness to the helplessness and degradation of the people around her – and this is when things are going well.

The facility is separated into three wards. The first floor is home to the central group of characters, the second ward is full of characters we never meet, and the third ward houses a man who declares himself the King of Ward Three (Gael Garcia Bernal) and the Accountant (Maury Chaykin), who has always been blind and is not, therefore, suffering from the disease. Only men live in the third ward and their combined brainpower and testosterone – and the fact that the King has somehow gotten hold of a handgun - lead them to tyrannize the other wards, taking over the food store and parcelling it out to the other wards in exchange for jewellery and sex. When it becomes apparent that the brutality of the third ward will only increase, the Doctor’s Wife decides to take matters into her own hands.

The basic premise of the story is interesting, but the use of literal blindness as a metaphor for the moral blindness of human beings just doesn’t work here because the allegory is so shallow. The characters, who are unnamed so that they may stand in for everyone, are one-dimensional and the problems that arise for them as a result of the epidemic are of little real consequence. At one point the Doctor, miserable because he has become entirely dependent on his wife, has sex with the Woman with the Dark Glasses. His wife discovers them in the act and… nothing. Literally. She is instantly forgiving and understanding and the incident is never mentioned again. Nothing that happens to these people really matters because they are given no capacity to carry any emotion over from one scene to another. Does the Boy, for example, care what has become of his mother, from whom he was separated when he was quarantined? She is mentioned once and then never again. The characters exist only from moment to moment and though the actors try valiantly to make them matter, the effort is futile because the film has so little interest in the characters as people, preferring instead to treat them as symbols.

Most of the effort in the films seems to have been put into the visuals with an aim towards simulating the experience of blindness. The photography shifts back and forth between murky darkness and washed out whiteness, but instead of being profound this feels like a gimmick, a way to distract the audience from the fact that the story has no depth. Fernando Meirelles is generally a very good director (City of God, The Constant Gardner are brilliant films) and his works often concern the struggle to maintain a shred of humanity when circumstances make turning to violence and cruelty seem like the only viable option. The difference is that those previous films were alive on the screen, while Blindness just lies there, soulless and empty.

Catch a glimpse of the film here: