Fernando Meirelles did boys with guns in "City of God" and murderous corporations in "The Constant Gardener." With "Blindness," the opening night entry at the Cannes Film Festival, the Brazilian director exposes the world's ultimate savages: your friends and neighbors.

A terrifying fable about how low people might go to stay alive when a plague of blindness turns them into helpless internees, "Blindness" presents an unnerving reflection of real tragedy and bureaucratic heartlessness, from Hurricane Katrina to global food shortages to the cyclone in Myanmar, where the military government has severely restricted relief efforts.

"There are different kinds of blindness. There's 2 billion people that are starving in the world," Meirelles said in an interview Thursday, a day after the film's Cannes premiere. "This is happening. It doesn't need a catastrophe. It's happening, and because there isn't an event like Katrina, we don't see."

Opening in U.S. theaters Sept. 19, "Blindness" is adapted from the novel by Portuguese author Jose Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.

The film chronicles the panic, disorder and barbarity that erupts after a contagion spreads "white blindness" throughout an unspecified city, with people's vision replaced by a milky cloud.

Victims are crammed into decrepit, filthy wards and left on their own, with no medical care. Scant food is provided, and trigger-happy soldiers gun down anyone they think might make a break for freedom, though all the afflicted can do is stumble about aimlessly.

The inmates include an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore), who inexplicably retains her sight but feigns blindness so she can accompany her husband into detention. Among their roommates are an old man (Danny Glover), a prostitute (Alice Braga), a thief (Don McKellar) and a married couple (Yusuke Iseya and Yoshino Kimura).

While that group tries to maintain a degree of order, their neighbors in another ward declare themselves "Lord of the Flies"-style rulers, led by a man (Gael Garcia Bernal) with a gun and a willingness to let bullets fly blindly. His thugs take over the food supply and force the others to pay with jewelry, and later, with their women.

"The other day, I heard somebody say, `It's inhuman. It's not human.' No, it is. The movie, it is about human beings, and how in a way, we're animals," Braga said. "If you're put in a situation, that's what would happen."

The action sinks to its most brutal in a gang-rape scene, which precipitates violent retribution and an unexpected escape for some victims, who emerge into a city overrun by staggering, starving survivors, the blind literally leading the blind to scavenge for food.

Could so many people descend so completely into bestiality?

"Look at what happens in war, and how whole towns are raped," Moore said. "We have this idea that we've got it together, but you see what happens when there is a natural disaster. Things crumble. Things literally crumble. So the sense that, oh, we have secured this, we have taken care of this, we know how to do this. In fact, we're just a step away from chaos." Continued...