Mini-Review: Blindness

Blindness
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
Released September 26, 2008

Fernando Meirelles has earned himself quite the reputation after scoring a surprise Oscar nomination for the unbelievably good “City of God” in 2003 and then following it up with the critically-acclaimed, though in my mind underwhelming “The Constant Gardener.” You might think that he’d be the perfect director to take on the story of an epidemic of blindness and the one woman on the inside who can still see. It’s a profoundly disturbing film that isn’t as affecting as it should be. It’s less than pleasant, but there’s no merit to it. The cinematography and editing are very much inferior to the more creative aesthetics of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” and no one in the cast is particularly great. The film takes a while to speed up, then slows right back down again, leading up to an annoyingly predictable ending. This should have been a better movie, and its lack of inventive storytelling is perhaps its biggest flaw.

D+