Blindness (2008)

Blindness is a movie like no other. Although it may fall short of the book's immense power, it still retains much of it. To those who have not read Jose Sarmago's book, it is about a world where people are suddenly going blind. When a opthamologist's wife (Julianne Moore) does not go blind, she is forced to watch all the terrors that surround her as all the blind are quarantined in an old mental hospital.

I see an Academy Award nomination in this film's future for the absolutely stunning visuals from Fernando Mereilles (City of God). His amazing direction shows the contrast in the world between light and dark which helps the often allegorical story.

There are immense differences between the book and the film. Although I have not yet finished reading the book, I have heard that the ending takes the story in a different direction than it had originally. This may be true, but the movie and book should be taken as two different things. Jose Sarmago's Pulitzer Prize winning vision of the story is of course going to be different than Fernando Mereille's vision of it. The film is of course visual, but the book creates a different kind of confusion. It creates a mental image of blindness whereas the movie is very blunt about it.

With stunning performances from Julianne Moore and Gael Garcia Bernal as a bad guy whose scenes are hard to watch, it seems impossible that reviewers could have possibly panned this. It's to bad that they can't see the beauty in Blindness.