'Blindness' (R)(out of four)

It's being marketed as some sort of dark fantasy -- a parable of death and salvation -- but "Blindness" is really something far more astonishing -- a haunting case study of how society would splinter, of how civilization would implode, if pushed to the breaking point.

Directed by the visionary Fernando Meirelles (the man behind the explosive "City of God" and the vitriolic "Constant Gardener") and based upon the acclaimed novel by Jose Saramago, "Blindness" envisions the world ending not with a bang but a whimper. At a crowded intersection in a nondescript city (we are never quite able to decipher the ambiguous locale), the flow of traffic comes to a halt, as a man behind the wheel starts to realize that his eyes are no longer functioning -- that all he can see is a whitish glow.

His symptoms will soon spread throughout the city, the blindness becoming an epidemic.

In a standard Hollywood blockbuster, the fallout of this disease would be the central concern. Yet the real horror here is the systematic breakdown of society that this blindness sets into motion.

We witness this breakdown through the eyes of the doctor's wife (Julianne Moore), the spouse of an eye specialist (Mark Ruffalo) who realizes long before anyone else that an epidemic is setting in. Trying to be the Good Samaritan, the doctor calls the authorities and instructs them to include him in any quarantine. Even though she has not lost her sense of sight, the doctor's wife insists on going along.

One can easily imagine this woman becoming the hero of the nightmare, the one-eyed king in the land of the blind. But as the situation grows dire, the doctor's wife is not a savior so much as the one who bears witness to the atrocities to come. Husband and wife are dispatched to a quarantine facility; a massive building that is quickly filled to the brim with dozens and then hundreds of blinded citizens.

Outside the gates are military officers with shotguns, terrified servicemen who have seemingly been instructed to keep the infected people locked up. Inside the gates, among the scared and lonely souls removed from society, we see a whole new power structure assert itself almost instantly.

Within the quarantine zone, people have arranged themselves in separate "wards," all dependent on what room they sleep in. The doctor is elected the leader of his group. Downstairs, meanwhile, the wily and vindictive bartender (Gael Garcia Bernal) appoints himself the "King of Ward Three." An opportunist and the only man with a gun, the bartender asserts his dominance over the others in quarantine. He steals the food rations that are delivered by the military on a daily basis, and demands that people hand over money and jewelry in exchange for nutrients. When the personal property is gone, he instructs each ward to offer up their women for sexual rendezvous.

It is a horrific prison scene, with huddled, starving masses living at the mercy of a madman. But Meirelles doesn't exploit the violence so much as use this space as a blank canvas, suggesting -- in ominous fashion -- what would happen to a group of isolated survivors if they were mixed in with a few bad apples and left to their own devices. What kind of cruelty -- and compassion -- would rise out of the ashes?

Most end-of-the-world scenarios involve zombies, or aliens, or nuclear winters. "Blindness," though, is not about forces external but internal. It imagines how average people would confront the unthinkable challenges of a societal breakdown, and it presents a compelling argument that the things to be feared most are not plagues or weapons of mass destruction, but the demons hidden deep within us all.