In the kingdom of the blind the two-eyed doctor’s wife is queen.
In this case, the “kingdom” is a run-down former asylum where a panicking government has quarantined all sufferers of a mystery virus that makes blind all come into contact with it.
Julianne Moore is reluctantly crowned “queen”, after she miraculously proves resistant to the contagion which strikes without warning and leaves the sufferer gazing into a milky opaqueness.
Faced with being separated from her husband, optometrist Mark Ruffalo, she feigns blindness and is despatched alongside him to a makeshift quarantine hospital.
It is soon apparent that the government is totally unprepared for such a pandemic and conditions rapidly deteriorate as the newly-blind grapple with what have become insurmountable problems such as washing and eating.
Abandoned by the powers-that-be, the sufferers are reduced to living in their own filth, wading through urine and rotting food, with the only advantage being Moore’s selfless, sighted heroine, who just about makes life bearable.
Adapted from author Jose Saramago’s apocalyptic fable, this kicks off as an action drama but quickly establishes itself primarily as a troubling meditation on social collapse, a sort of visually-impaired Lord of the Flies.
Monstrously emerging through the misery of life in the hospital is Gael Garcia Bernal’s King of Ward Three, a barman-turned-despot who seizes control of food distribution, first demanding valuables and then hitting on a venal rations-for-sex system among the desperate women.
These are profoundly unsettling scenes – shot mercilessly by Mereilles - and present Moore’s sighted Good Samaritan with a vile escalation of the moral burden she is already shouldering: to submit means daily degradation while to resist could spell all-out war.
Convincingly filmed in bleached-out tones on the streets of Montevideo and Sao Paulo, it's a sharply realistic allegory yet its symbolic thrust - moral blindness is worse than losing your sight - is slightly hampered by a story that doesn't quite reach its ambition.
Tim Evans
