IN FERNANDO MEIRELLES’ vision of the apocalypse, there is no red or yellow. The world is bathed in a palate of grays and blues. Blindness could almost have been filmed on the set of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, where despite impending doom, the universe seemed to be composed of great-looking people in tailor-made suits. The End of the World as a GQ photo spread. Meirelles’ propensity for flashy stylization infiltrates every scene of Blindness. The frames are always crowded with bodies and noise and movement.

Don’t get me wrong, I love this director’s quirks. He has a beautiful aesthetic that makes his worlds, no matter how troubling, things of beauty. Whenever an artist sticks to their vision, you are bound to have details that reveal their own character despite the universe they have created. Artistic visionaries often decorate their films in the way that children decorate a room. Things are there because they want them to be – there will always be a toy soldier on the bureau no matter what the decor. If dogs and animals wander around the set, it is because Meirelles no doubt finds them inherently moving.

Based on Portuguese author José Saramago’s book, the film begins with a single man in his car suddenly going blind in the middle of traffic. In the following scenes, blindness spreads like a virus through the city at an alarming rate. The blind are quarantined in an abandoned insane asylum, where life quickly deteriorates into an unimaginable state of confusion. The inhabitants can’t witness the actual physical squalor of their existence, but one nameless woman (Julianne Moore), who is immune to the virus but pretends to be blind to accompany her husband, is able to witness everything. Some of the most profound moments of the film are her reactions to the pitiable conditions around her. It is harder to witness her reactions than the actual events themselves.

Physical blindness seems to be a representation of complete cynicism and helplessness. It doesn’t have a relationship to actually being blind and the way that one learns to cope and adapt to it. (The morality of using an actual disability as a metaphor for despair and confusion is, of course, questionable.) The characters are less victims of blindness, than they are victims to one another’s whims. That they are trapped with one another seems to concern them more than their actual blindness. Although their blindness is white light, they are terrified of being left in the darkness at one another’s mercy.

The film is obviously allegorical, but its allegory is so broad that it loses impact. Are we supposed to think that society is blind and in need of a leader with vision? If so, these large messages have little impact or resonance. When Gael Garcia Bernal appears on the scene (all characters are nameless), the movie’s tension begins to escalate. At first it seems that Don McKellar, a petty thief and lowlife, is representing evil, but when Bernal suddenly declares himself the King of Ward Three, we realize we have been misled about what a truly evil person can be.

He’s an Iago-like character. There doesn’t seem to be any motivation to his actions, except to see how much power he can have. He’s going to inflict an evil dictatorship, just because it amuses him. He is the funniest, most ambitious and actually the happiest person in the film. In the outside world he was a bartender, but in hell he has all the qualifications to rule. His reign of terror escalates until life in the ward becomes impossible.

Interestingly, with the complete breakdown of society, women and men are suddenly equal in the film, which leaves the men feeling emasculated. Marriages all fall apart because the men can’t provide for or protect the women. Julianne Moore becomes the central action hero, as her ability to see makes her capable of what have now become superhuman feats.

Sex becomes monstrous, divorced from relationships, meaning and hope. A mass rape scene (difficult to watch) resembles Brueghel’s painting of hell. It is easy to compare this film to paintings because its power lies in the visual moments and isolated scenes. There is an array of ordinary naked bodies which you rarely see on film. A middle-aged woman lies naked on her bed, looking very much like a Lucien Freud painting, at once destroyed and beautiful.

Danny Glover’s voiceover is maudlin, overly sentimental and out of place. Glover points out how life is still beautiful even when the world is falling apart, which we already implicitly understand.

To say that something is flawed nowadays is almost a compliment. It implies that there is something about it of great beauty, at times the opposite of flawed. Although the third act is meandering, some moments are overwhelming and profound. Meirelles conveys the vulnerability of humans in a way that shows the extent to which we can experience horror and joy. The breadth of our capacity to feel is always a frightening thing.