Cinema’s paradoxical fascination with blindness has fired such diverse movies as Terence Young’s thriller Wait Until Dark, Takeshi Kitano’s martial-arts actioner Zatôichi and Gary Tarn’s electrifying documentary Black Sun. Here, it serves as a jumping-off point for a melancholic psychodrama about identity, love, and the eye of the beholder. Ellen Dorrit Petersen is Ingrid, a Norwegian writer who has recently lost her sight, and who now spends her days typing tales of infidelity and online pornography through which she filters anxieties about her relationship with her architect husband. In dreams she has the power to turn the lights on and off, but in real life she is retreating ever further into invisibility. Eskil Vogt’s stylish, discursive drama has flashes of searing black comedy and an affecting sense of visual isolation, but it’s unclear whether we’re supposed to open or close our eyes to its more prurient explorations of voyeurism, which in turn serve to distract rather than focus our attention.
