As the saying goes, there are none so blind as those who will not see.

Do people see panhandlers or homeless people on the street? What about the victims of Hurricane Katrina, who have been supplanted by the victims of Hurricane Ike and all the storms in between? And what to make of health officials who convene meetings while victims die?

All of those questions come to mind watching "Blindness," an adaptation of the Jose Saramago novel. Directed by Fernando Meirelles and written by Don McKellar, it chronicles an epidemic of blindness called the "White Sickness," which strikes without warning and leaves victims feeling as if they're swimming in a sea of milky white.

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'Blindness'

• Starring: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo.
• Rating: R for violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity.
• Web site: 'Blindness'

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The government warehouses the blind in an abandoned mental asylum, leaving the sightless to their own increasingly divisive devices. Among the quarantined are a now-blind physician (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore), secretively still sighted.

Her vision is a blessing and curse as she can see the squalor and filth along with the faces of the men who trade food for jewelry and sexual services. (That is one reason the National Federation of the Blind is protesting the movie, which it says "portrays blind people as monsters," The Associated Press reported.)

With the gates locked and patrolled by armed soldiers, the quarantined space becomes a social experiment dominated by indecency, violence and selfishness but with shrinking pockets of protection, love and altruism.

"City of God" and "The Constant Gardener" director Meirelles uses chimes and distorted, back-lighted figures to signal a world vastly changed. The opening 12-lane madness of traffic gives way to eerily empty and quiet highways, debris-filled city streets, looted stores and starving dogs who feast on a corpse.

In addition to Ruffalo and Moore, who is our representative on screen and excellent as always, "Blindness" stars Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, Alice Braga and Maury Chaykin.

Although "Blindness" explores some of the same themes as "28 Weeks Later" and "Diary of the Dead," it's a parable that can be interpreted many ways. Meirelles suggests it can be a metaphor about reactions to natural disasters, an allegory about the future, commentary on being blind to what's happening around you, meditation on primal instincts or examination of human weaknesses and strengths.

It skims across all of those possibilities and never mines any too deeply. "Blindness" pries open our eyes and forces us to look, but it cannot always make us see clearly or feel deeply.