At the film's centre is one woman (played by Julianne Moore) who remains unaffected by the plague. Why, we are never told. She keeps her sightedness a secret from the rest of the group, whose relationships with each other are at the best abrasive, so as to be able to stay with her husband (Mark Ruffalo). A feud breaks out with a bunch of degenerates in another part of the building who, guns at the ready, trade food for sex. Everybody is demeaned. Finally, the woman leads a small group out of their prison and across the city to her abandoned home; they form a kind of alternative family.
This is all very uplifting, but why does she wait so long before doing anything? She endures all sorts of indignities, but for no good reason. In the kingdom of the blind she could have been queen, and yet for far too long she holds back and it is only mayhem which forces her to act. I imagine that her tentativeness is treated with much more subtlety in the book, but this is a film and we are not so privy to inner worlds. The behaviour of the central character strikes us as weak if not nonsensical. When Hollywood producers want "Complex" and "Damaged" in a leading lady, they reach first for Julianne Moore. She is dependably good at that here, but under Meirelles's direction she becomes simply a drag on the action.
None of this is to say that the film is devoid of subtext. At times, as figures lurch along deserted wards or slump naked on filthy beds, it feels like a zombie movie with a touch of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. As in that film, there's a predictable sense of the blindness representing some form of oppression by authority. A nameless announcer voices warnings and commands from a TV screen; guards patrol the "inmates" from ramparts (although why there is the need for quarantine, when everybody in the city is in the same boat is also never explained). People are kept, literally, in the dark.
Above all, one is left with the sense that there is something not very original about all of this. There's a conflict at the heart of it: we may learn to see each other anew when the constraints, pressures and conventions of everyday society are removed; and yet the film seems at the same time to be saying that, without these constraints, human beings descend into squalor and selfishness very quickly indeed. In any case, if the final message is simply "only connect", it would be nice not to have to endure such relentless bleakness for two hours before hearing it.
