Even with stirring acting by an all-star cast consisting of Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael García Bernal and Danny Glover, “Blindness,” from acclaimed producer Fernando Meirelles (2002’s “City of God”), is not quite a pleasant cinematic experience.

Flashing glimpses of white, blurred figures and overall confusion dominate as the audience is subjected to a sort of visual torture.

The film focuses on a nameless city plagued by an epidemic of blindness.

A “milky white” sense of terror consumes the affected as they realize they have suddenly been left without their sense of sight.

Systematically, the government quarantines those infected.

The victims seek, in an eerily familiar “Lord of the Flies” manner, a sense of order through war.

In theory, this allegorical movie based on José Saramago’s award-winning novel is an interesting study. Men and women are left in blinding light, completely detached from society, and yet still buffeted by social disorder.

Since “Blindness” focuses solely on hammering in the horrors of an unordered life, it becomes very hard for the viewers to stay still in their seats.

No longer is the focus on the allegory of the cinema, but the horrors of the concentration camp-like quarantine and the chilling rape screams of the camp’s women.

Scenes of blind prisoners feeling their way up hallways saturated in human waste, women submitting sexually in exchange for food rations, and guards taking shots at all who disobey flash endlessly throughout the movie’s 121 minutes.

Moore, playing the wife of an imprisoned eye doctor, gives a devoted portrayal of the one person in the camp left with sight. Keeping her vision a secret, she attempts to protect and help the inmates.

Bernal gives a haunting performance as a power-hungry dictator driven by depravation to disaster.

The film strives for a sense of reprieve and solace, but the ending fails to make sense of what happened and why.

Viewers leave the movie disoriented and gutted of all emotion, and perhaps just relieved that the film is finally over.

While it is intellectually stimulating, “Blindness” is an important film, just not one that I can easily recommend you to submit yourself to.