José Saramago’s 1995 novel “Blindness” portrays the collapse of a society whose members suffer from sightlessness. Critical acclaims and praises came for the fact that the sudden loss of sight is a metaphor for the lack of communication and respect in a community. Human relationships are weaker and weaker, while deference and esteem have vanished almost completely. This is what blindness stood for in Saramago’s novel.

However, it is not certain whether the film adaptation of the book focuses on the same points. It somehow depicts the same happenings, but viewers may actually take the plot for what it is and not for what it suggest, as the film fails to peer into psychological analysis of the human mind in such conditions.

“Blindness” opens with a man at a stoplight. You may be thinking that an accident is very likely to occur. Well, not really. The man loses his sight out of the blue and, unable to see where he’s walking, he is helped by a stranger to get home. After they arrive, his wife gets blind, too, and so does the man who took him home. And so do the nurse and physician who came to provide him medical care. And so does everybody, as a blindness epidemic develops quickly.

Numerous contaminated people are quarantined in an abandoned mental hospital, where nobody offers them treatment. They are guarded by several armed soldiers who throw them food and then run for their lives (or eyes). Although every single one of the people inside the hospital is blind, there is one woman, played by Julianne Moore, who is still able to see. She is somehow immune to the epidemic, but does not divulge it, as she does not want to be separated from her husband (Mark Ruffalo), an ophthalmologist who also lost his sight.

As the epidemic wreaks havoc on the outside world as well, the people quarantined are completely forgotten and disregarded and chaos comes to claim its victims.

The characters are nameless and so are the city and country in which the action takes place, as director Fernando Meirelles followed Mr. Saramago’s storyline and plot scheme.

Nevertheless, the novel’s thorough psychological examination and character complexity are lost somewhere on the way to the big screen. They are changed with an exaggerated amount of aggression and immorality, which feels out of place. The atmosphere fails to transmit the dark, thought-provoking tone used in the novel and becomes dull and dreary in the film.

The sick, remote world of the infected will reach its downfall, while some of the victims will make it to the larger city, where everything looks even shoddier. Animals have started to devour human bodies that lay on the streets, while houses look grey and deserted. The doctor’s wife eventually gets to a supermarket where, in the midst of people suffering from sightlessness, she feels a bit stronger, she feels she has succeeded to get over the worst. Julianne Moore reminds us of a long-lost novel heroine who forgot how to smile, but whose inner side feels nonetheless more powerful after the crisis is over, although there’s not much left to smile at.