MSN has a teaser trailer for Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of Jose Saramango’s astonishing novel, Blindness. The trailer can best be described as seriously creepy, and except for one voice over misstep at the end, it creates an almost perfect sense of dread.

In Blindness a White Sickness – a contagious blindness – sweeps over a city. The government begins rounding people up and quarantining them in a hospital without care or supervision. Julianne Moore plays a woman who accompanies her husband (Mark Ruffalo) to the hospital but who is the only person immune to the White Sickness. She has to pretend to be blind to fit in with the hordes of unsighted who have taken over the city. It’s a powerful book, full of meaty themes and metaphors, so it’s heartening that a real director like Meirelles has tackled it (as well as a writer like Don McKellar) as opposed to some hack who will approach the story as just another apocalypse disease movie.

Click here to see the trailer. Blindness won’t be playing any time soon but will be doing the festival circuit – possibly Cannes, probably Toronto. I’d love to get a chance to see this one early.