Blind

(Eskil Vogt/2014/Norway)

Ingrid, a writer who has lost her sight, retreats to her apartment and immerses herself in the stories she creates for fictional characters in her head. Slowly she loses touch with her real life and transposes indiscretions and paranoid fantasies onto her husband. This is a well crafted story, elegantly told and a genuine inquiry on the sensory displacement of the blind. Sound is all important and the overall effect of the continuous auditory narrative of muffled traffic, house creaks, breathes and ambient cacophony is to put the viewer directly into the world of someone with impaired vision. Touch also is demonstrated as key, although maybe not to the same degree, with scenes of Ingrid pressing herself against a glass window, stroking fabric with her fingers and describing walls with her hand. The culmination of the tension between Ingrid’s fantasies and her real life is an excellent moment of meta-narrative when the husband in her head begins to question her thought processes and paranoia as if he were her real husband presenting her with the truth.

(3/5)