Watch critic Wendy Ide give her verdict on Blindness

The opening night film of the 61st edition of the Cannes Film Festival is a sour and unexpected shock. Blindness is the most miserable opening to an international festival I’ve ever seen. After the impossibly glamorous conveyor belt of stars last year to celebrate 60 sensational years of art-house premieres, the festival has switched off the fairy lights, tightened its belt, and got back to the grim business of showcasing the self-flagellating auteurs of the future.

Blindness will win precisely no fans. But plenty of trenchant admirers. I suspect that Sean Penn, the exotic and unpredictable chairman of this year’s offical competition, will champion the film wholeheartedly.

It is, after all, madly ambitious. I know José Saramango won the Nobel Prize for literature on the bleak strength of this book. I just can’t understand why no one called The Samaritans when Fernando Meirelles had the insane idea to turn into a film. The story is a wrist-slitting nightmare about tedious next-door neighbours who are forced to shelve their ethnic, social, and sexual differences when the entire world suddenly comes to a grinding halt.

Perfectly respectable doctors like Mark Ruffalo walk into plate glass windows and concrete walls due a mysterious virus which renders every middle-class actor with workshop experience totally blind. For reasons never explained, Julianne Moore is the only human on the planet who seems totally immune to this bizarre plague. Happily she is Mark’s wife. Unhappily she has a lethal crowd of blind and hungry delinquents to look after. Armed soldiers wearing Perspex goggles lock the cast in an office basement, and throw away the keys.

The guilty twist is that Moore fails to tell anyone (except her irritated husband Mark) that she can still see. The 120 minute lopsided question is this: is the saintly and wildly stressed Moore trying to fumble an escape from this municipal hell-hole? Or does she actually enjoy the urine squalor and Holocaust conditions? It’s not rocket science. This is elemental Moore, the reeky queen of self-lacerating close-ups. What price (or indeed use) a conscience under these unbearable extremes?

Gabriel Garciá’s stubbly bully wants his wicked way with Moore. When he squints and blinks in her direction you know it’s only a matter of time before he sinks his greedy fingers into her flesh. The exchange rate for rape and humiliation in this blighted municipal basement is a plate of precious food. I honestly can’t guess what kind of artistic pleasure Meirelles divined in this sci-fi biblical fable. The 28 Days Later shots of spooky and shattered streets are collectors’ items. But the performances are not scrapbook material. Ruffalo’s agonising turn as the tortured husband, desperate to keep some sort of moral candle alight, is more in tune with the Olympic torch than riveting cinema.

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