"Blindness was supposed to work as an allegory for urban alienation, but it soon begins to feel like an exploitation horror with pretensions of being more."

Zombies aren't what's cool about zombie movies, particularly ones directed by George A. Romero. Zombies are just a way for smart masters of horror to explore how humanity confronts world-shaking events. Zombies are a hurricane, a disease, a nuclear war, whatever you want them to be. The point is: Man sucks and, when faced with cataclysmic obstacles, the majority of the species will devolve right in front of your eyes. Don't believe me? Watch the post-Katrina news footage. Scary stuff. Director Fernando Meirelles's Blindness is a zombie movie, except with no zombies. It's shot like one; scenes build with the intensity of horror, and human beings, when pushed to their emotional limits, actually begin to behave with the base instincts of zombies -- but nope, no zombies here. Instead, Meirelles uses a sudden pandemic of blindness to show how fragile society is and how quickly its members will return to their jungle mentality when fear replaces hope.

Why would I bring up zombies with regards to a "serious" movie that "seriously" explores philosophical and sociological themes? Well, probably because Romero and a lot of his brethren do it better than it's been done in Blindness. Moreover, Blindness leaves you as uncomfortable as watching a zombie hand slowly pull Olga Karlatos's eye into a dagger of wood in Zombie. If you have a squeamish stomach, at all, you will not make it through this movie. Can you say "mass rape scene"? Yeah, not for the kiddies, kid.

Things kick off with a sudden outbreak of "white sickness" that leaves its victims without sight, feeling as if they're "swimming through milk." In order to prevent its spread, the government begins depositing patients into quarantined industrial buildings outside the city where the blind are forced to fend for themselves. Boxes of food are delivered periodically. No medical assistance is offered. Even though the blind couldn't manage a run for it, those who stumble too close to perimeter fences are shot dead and then expected to be buried by, you know, the blind. Amongst those so imprisoned are a call girl (Alice Braga), a wise sage (Danny Glover), an ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo), and the ophthalmologist's wife who can still see (Julianne Moore).

Days and then weeks pass as the building's many levels fill up with patients who now wander about in states of undressed, shuffling through feces, having sex in public like animals. On the lowest level of this Dante-like Inferno resides a loud-mouthed wannabe-dictator (Gael Garcia Bernal) who leads a revolt to claim all incoming food for his followers. The other levels must at first trade their possessions, and then their women to eat. This is where the mass rape comes in, which is probably one of the most horrible things I've seen onscreen in some time. At least with zombies, you know it's not real. In Blindness, the humans behave with as much inhumanity as the undead. In the face of that inhumanity, even the noble, like Moore's character, are reduced to taking arms.

Blindness was supposed to work as an allegory for urban alienation, or at least I'm guessing as much from the early moments of the flick, but it soon begins to feel like an exploitation horror with pretensions of being more. Romero would've gotten how to do it right.

C-

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