The movie begins when a few people gain sudden blindness.
When the world is afraid it is contagion the government quarantines the group. Others follow in the government prison who are also blind and the movie follows the prison gang activities between three rooms of prisoners in their quest for survival. The outside is shut off and the characters are not shown what has become of the world during the movie.
One of the rooms in the prison, Ward 3, is made up of all men prisoners who take over the food rations. The King of Ward 3 has a gun. As people begin to starve the room of all men offer food in exchange for valuables. After no more valuables are to be had an orgy with the women and wives is wanted.
Women volunteer to save the rest of the prisoners from starvation. Half with bravery, half in tears they walk into the room of blind men reaching out in the air for them.
The movie fades to black as you listen to grunts of the men and a flicker of a spotlight show a fist in air cracking down on the skull of a woman who has gone into shock and called by the blind men a “dead fish”. The fist moves and the sound of the skull being hit as she is being raped with his loud voice “Move for me!” unsettles the other women who in the end of the scene bring out her dead body in their arms like pallbearers.
This encourages one woman who had entered with her husband who has her sight try to launch a gang war fare in the government makeshift prison. She walks into Ward 3, kills the King, the group of men dissolve into disarray. One blind woman sets fire to Ward 3 and it begins to burn down, the heroin leads the blind outside into the main yard only to find the guards are gone and they are free. Only to discover that the world outside is also fallen to the illness, they make their way through littered streets to find everyone is blind.
With “Blindness,” the director, Fernando Meirelles (a Brazilian filmmaker whose previous features include “City of God” and “The Constant Gardener”), sometimes seems overly enamored of arresting images, manipulating light, color and composition at the expense of emotional or narrative clarity. Here he revels in the paradox of trying to use a visual medium to convey the experience of sightlessness and excels at showing what the world of the blind might look like. And he is not above exploiting both the comical and the horrific aspects of their condition, punctuating scenes of cruelty and dread with moments of grimly funny slapstick. “Blindness” is 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.
