Blindsided is a 2019 horror film about young recently blinded woman whose father leaves her for the weekend with her two best friends.
I’m not going to say that there haven’t been a few good movies that feature blind characters as just normal people in the story, their condition inconsequential to the plot. However, most make blindness crucial to the goings on, naturally, and in horror films especially, they are an easy way to add suspense, we seeing what they can’t. A near countless number of movies over the past few decades have clung to this trope, sticking to a strict set of rules in pumping out generic fodder for cheap screams. Now comes writer and director Johnny Mitchell‘s latest effort Blindsided (formerly Darker Than Night), a low budget title that doesn’t stray one step off the path, making it passable entertainment that’s almost immediately forgettable.
Sloan Carter (Bea Santos) is a college-aged young woman who recently was blinded for reasons held secret. Her father is professor David Carter (Paul Popowich), a criminal psychologist teaching a class of students who don’t seem interested one damn bit about their career paths. He decides to bring his daughter home to stay with a few friends, Mika (Melinda Shankar) and her boyfriend Toby (Erik Knudsen). Not long after arrives Tom (Atticus Mitchell), a young protege of the good professor, the group doing their best to have some fun, though tensions are weirdly high. Of course, things go very wrong when a mysterious vengeful young woman (Carlyn Burchell) comes along packing a sharp knife. But is she working alone?
Filmed mostly inside the large house, Blindsided is a shoestring budget of a movie that has its few plot points laid out in front of it like concrete blocks, so predictable you know what’s going to happen not long after the opening scene. That’s not entirely bad of course, many movies relying on simplicity to tell a story. However, there’s nothing innovate in the works here at all, the story so contrived and obvious, it’s like reading the alphabet, right down to the ‘z’. You know what’s coming is what I’m saying.
Shot in ultra dim lighting so laden with heavy shadows that it’s almost hard to see who is on screen, the movie feels artificial from the start, despite good efforts by some of the cast, including Santos, who does what she can with the cliché-riddled part. She at least convinces as a blind woman, carrying on her shoulders well the final girl machinations we’ve come to expect. However, with uninspired dialogue and a conveyor belt mentality to delivering jump scares, there’s nothing about this that makes it significant, including a hopelessly cookie-cutter ending that is, well, I guess just what it should be considering everything else.
Probably, the filmmakers knew that, deciding early on to just package a standard thriller and heap it on the pile. Plenty go about changing their titles and plenty more offer fans what they want, low budget horror purposefully designed to be familiar. This is exactly that.