By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

Usually when I make a film, I can get started by going to Google, doing research,” Fernando Meirelles said a little nervously, a few hours before a screening in Montreal of his ambitious new movie “Blindness.”
“But this is a film based on nothing,” he said. “It’s all invented - a generic city with characters who have no names and no past, who get a disease that doesn’t exist. After I got involved in the film, I realized, wow, this is like a trap.
That’s one possible metaphor. Here’s another: To make this movie in a spirit faithful to its source, a 1995 novel (of the same name) by the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, Mr. Meirelles had to fly blind.
In the movie, as in the book, every character but one - an ophthalmologist’s wife played by Julianne Moore - is affected by the title affliction, which is, mysteriously, contagious. (And which manifests itself not as darkness but as total whiteness.) “In most films everything is based on the eyes,” Mr. Meirelles said. “You cut to show where the character is looking, that’s how you tell stories. It’s all about point of view, and I wasn’t going to do this film showing only Julianne’s character’s point of view. So how do you get people involved with the characters when you can’t put them in the same position visually?”
His solution, he said, was to “put the audience in this blind world, to try to deconstruct the image, if I can say that. Sometimes the image is washed out, sometimes it’s out of focus, sometimes the framing is totally wrong, deliberately, and toward the end of the film I even tried separating the sound from the image - showing a character with his mouth shut, but you’re hearing his voice.”
“It was all very experimental,” he said. “Very scary.”
“Blindness,” which had its premier in Brazil on August 26 and first opens in Asia in Japan on November 22, is not scary in a horror-movie way. Despite the speculative nature of the plot and the pervasive aura of doom, “this isn’t science fiction, really,” Mr. Meirelles insisted. “It’s a metaphor.”
Mr. Meirelles clearly approached this difficult story without a lot of genre preconceptions. The longest and most harrowing section of “Blindness” takes place in a locked-down, heavily guarded holding facility in which the government has quarantined the first victims of the epidemic, and these scenes are filmed with the sort of immersive, hyperkinetic realism that Mr. Meirelles brought to his earlier films “City of God” (2002) and “The Constant Gardener” (2005).
It’s only in the final half-hour or so, when the main characters, sprung from confinement, wander through the devastated, chaotic city in search of food and shelter, that the movie begins to resemble more familiar end-of-the-world narratives: rubble, looted shops, hungry dogs, fear.
But, Mr. Meirelles said, “The plague here is just an excuse to explore human behavior - how this blindness affected people, how they’d react if nobody could see them and they could do anything, knowing that they won’t be judged.”
And how do they react- Not well. “I agree with Saramago,” Mr. Meirelles said. “After all these years of civilization we’re still very primitive. In a crisis, we always seem to go back to our basic instincts, everything becomes about eating and sex. I want the film to remind us that we’re part of nature, not so special - we’re really animals.”
It is risky for Mr. Meirelles to make an apocalyptic movie that doesn’t externalize our fears in the form of zombies, vampires or giant monsters. The blindness epidemic has the effect of turning people inward, where the demons are hardest to fight.
Mr. Saramago, in his novel, and Mr. Meirelles, in his film, try to do without the usual jolts of genre action movies, and in their absence the world really does look unfamiliar: bleak, arbitrary, experimental - a world inventing itself as it goes along. What action “Blindness” has consists mostly of the heedless operations of pure chance. It takes a fair amount of faith to try to imagine the world this way . Mr. Meirelles, though, is convinced that the risk is worth it.
“This movie,” he said, “is about how we lose our humanity and how we get it back, how we learn to see again.”