TORONTO - Is this the end of days? It feels like it in "Blindness," the harrowing new film based on Jose Saramago's apocalyptic novel.
Mass chaos ensues when one by one the citizens of a nameless city go blind. Treated like lepers by those who can still see, the "White Sickness" victims are snapped up by men in guns and hurled into "care" facilities -- code for government sanctioned prisons.
From hookers to housewives, the halls of one such grisly quarantine fill with the face of humanity. Yet among them is a surprise: A woman who can see (Julianne Moore).
There is no explanation for her vision, just as there is no way to explain the cause of the epidedmic. Yet she keeps her sight a secret in order to accompany her husband (Mark Ruffalo) into this new hell.
Unapologetically, that's exactly what director Fernando Meirelles delivers in this slickly crafted drama.
"It's not a place where things get pretty," the director of "City of God" and "The Constant Gardener" told journalists at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Inside the ward, the same social "order" known in the outside world is imposed within its whitewashed walls by the "good guy" doctor played by Ruffalo and a reprobate sychopath (Gael Garcia Bernal).
Aided by his scumbag accountant crony (Maury Chaykin), a man who, ironically, is born blind, Bernal and his beastly accomplices take control of the food and impose their wims on the ward members.
"You wanna eat?" he asks like snarling little Nazi. "Then give us what you've got."
When the inmates' material possessions run out, they're forced to comply with Bernal's next barbarous demand: "Bring us your women."
Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, long resisted the idea of having his 1995 masterwork adapted for the bigscreen.
"He was afraid of somebody coming along and turning it into a crazy horror story," says Meirelles.
It's easy to see why. Bodies are turfed carelessly and excrement lines the quarantine from wall to wall.
One would assume that such a disaster would make these innmates more compassionate -- it doesn't.
Like the world outside it's walls, the prison becomes a microcosm of the horrors sanctioned by mankind every day.
So the film asks: Can blindness make the world see right from wrong? However, the film isn't entirely pessimistic: there's still hope, at least enough to make us believe something good can come from such torture.
"It takes a human disaster like this to make people open their eyes," says Ruffalo, Moore's law-abiding yet emasculated mate.
"When I first read this book I just couldn't believe it. How could people do this to one another? Then I thought Saramago's a communist. He's just taking his shot at the rest of the world," says Ruffalo.
"You look at this film and the people in it and just shake your head. There's more than enough food to feed everyone in this world. There's more than enough money to make sure that everyone has a house, that everyone can get educated, that everyone can look forward to some kind of future," says Ruffalo.
"I think that's why this story hits audiences so hard. It reminds us to open our eyes, take a good look at all that we have and do something good with it."
