5 reasons I’m psyched for ‘Blindness’

1. People start going blind for no apparent reason -- like, almost everybody -- which results in a breakdown of human society. Sounds like Children of Men meets Day of the Triffids. Sounds like smart science fiction for grownup.s

2. I’m supremely curious to see how director Fernando Meirelles handles this:

When you do a film, everything is related to point-of-view, to vision. When you have two characters in a dialogue, emotion is expressed by the way people look at each other, through the eyes. Especially in the cut, the edit. You usually cut when someone looks over. Film is all about point-of-view and in this film there is none.

(That’s the director speaking, quoted in the Guardian.)

3. Screenwriter Don McKellar -- adapting Jose Saramago’s novel -- intrigues me, too:

None of the characters even have names or a history, which is very untraditional for a Hollywood story. The film, like the novel, directly addresses sight and point of view and asks you to see things from a different perspective.

(That’s from promo material from Cannes, where the film debuted in the spring.) McKellar has a track record of telling genre-busting science fiction stories: see his Last Night, which he wrote, directed, and starred in.

4. The cast is spectacular -- Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Alice Braga -- but I’m most excited to see McKellar himself, whom I’ve come to be a big fan of (particularly, lately through the Canadian TV series Slings & Arrows), and Gael García Bernal. I keep waiting for him to break out as a big star; he’s certainly got that indefinable movie-star It.

5. It’s not a Hollywood film: it’s a joint Brazilian-Canadian production. So we can take a big of a breather from studio bombast and black-and-white certainty.