Blindness
Blindness
Plot
The story of Blindness begins one morning in an unnamed city during rush-hour traffic. As the lights change, a young professional Japanese man is suddenly struck blind for no apparent reason and consequently impedes all the cars behind the one hed been driving. With the increasing consternation and honking horns of these other drivers attracting attention, the Japanese man is approached by some concerned citizens, one of whom (Don McKellar) offers to drive him home. As they proceed to drive, the Japanese man describes his sudden affliction: an expanse of dazzling white, as though he is “swimming in milk.” Eventually the men arrive at the Japanese mans apartment, but as soon as the Japanese man assures the “samaritan” that hed be fine alone waiting for his wife to come home, the latter departs with the car keys to steal the vehicle.
Upon arriving later that evening and noticing her husbands predicament, the Japanese mans wife takes him to a local ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) who, after testing the Japanese mans eyes, can identify nothing wrong with his sight and recommends further evaluation at a hospital. Among the eye doctors patients are a kind old man with a black eye patch (Danny Glover), a woman with dark glasses (Alice Braga), and a young boy (Mitchell Nye). Later that same evening, the car thief is also struck blind, abandoning the Japanese mans car as he runs down the street.
At home with his loving wife (Julianne Moore), the doctor discusses the strange case of sudden blindness that hit the Japanese man. Elsewhere in the city, the Woman with Dark Glasses – revealed to be a prostitute – becomes the third victim of blindness after an appointment with a client in a luxury hotel.
The next day, the doctor wakes up to realize that he too has gone blind, which panics him all the more out of fear that he may have infected his wife in turn, but she refuses his attempts to keep her at arms length and promises she will be safe. In various locations around the city, several more citizens are struck blind, causing widespread fear, and the Ministry of Health organise a quarantine in a local derelict hospital in an attempt to suppress the plague of sudden blindness. When a Hazmat crew arrives to pick up the doctor, his wife climbs into the van with him, adamantly claiming she has also gone blind in order to accompany him into isolation.
In the asylum, the doctor and his wife are first to arrive and both agree they will keep her sight a secret. Several others arrive, the woman with dark glasses, the Japanese man, the car thief, and the boy. At first a fight breaks out between the Japanese man and the car thief, but the doctor pulls them apart, effectively assuming de facto leadership of the ward. In time, the Japanese man is reunited with his wife, who becomes all but catatonic as a result of her sudden disability. Then the doctors wife – who continues to remain sighted – comes across the old man with the eye patch, who describes the conditions of the world outside. The sudden blindness, known only as the “White Sickness” is now international, with hundreds of cases being reported every day. Desperate and hysterical, the government resorts to increasingly ruthless and aggressive measures to try and staunch the epidemic.
In due course, as more and more people are crammed into the hospital, the overcrowding and utter lack of official support or care causes hygiene, living conditions, and morale to degrade horrifically in a very short time. Anxiety over the availability of food, caused by delivery irregularities, act to undermine solidarity; and lack of organization prevents the internees from fairly distributing food or chores. Soldiers assigned to the asylum primarily to guard the internees from leaving become increasingly hostile to the captives. The military refuse to allow in basic medicines, so that a simple infection becomes deadly. During one load of new internees, a man wanders too far away from the group and is shot down, as well as two other people caught in the crossfire. A shovel is merely tossed over a wall for the three people to be buried.
Conditions degenerate further, as an armed clique, led by the “King of Ward 3” a former barman (Gael García Bernal), gains control over deliveries of food which is distributed only in exchange for valuables. And when those assets are exhausted, they demand the women until one is brutally murdered by her rapist. Faced with starvation and bent on revenge, the doctors wife ultimately murders the King of Ward 3, initiating a war between the interned factions that culminates with the asylum being burned down. Only then do the survivors discover that the army has abandoned the place so they are free to venture out into the