Sightless Parent Guide

Ellen (Madelaine Petsch) is struggling. Her ex-husband is in prison for at least 15 years after defrauding basically everyone they know, leaving her alone and friendless. Her isolation only deepens when an assault leaves her completely blind. Her brother, who is currently in Japan on business, arranges for her to have at-home care in a new apartment with an expert in helping the recently disabled – Clayton (Alexander Koch). But without her sight, Ellen becomes increasingly fearful. Her other senses are highly tuned, and the trauma that resulted from the attack triggers paranoia. Nightmares and hallucinations lead her to doubt everything she thinks she knows – and some things just aren’t stacking up.

This is an interesting premise for a horror movie, and parts of it are cleverly executed. Sightless experiments with an “unreliable narrator” in that what you see on screen isn’t what actually happens: it’s what Ellen thinks is happening. The disconnect between the two creates a space for the filmmakers to slip in some interesting scares, and for the plot to confront the audience with their own expectations.

That being said, this is a remarkably clean horror film. Cussing is limited to one extreme profanity and infrequent mild swearing, and the only sexual content is someone taking a shower – with no explicit nudity. Your big concerns here are going to be some (frankly understandable) stress-related drinking and some violence. Horror movies tend to go all-out on the gore, but this one actually has less violence than the average Marvel superhero flick. It’s treated more seriously, but no one’s getting thwacked with a massive hammer or disintegrated by a laser. Violent scenes mainly consist of small physical altercations, limited to hitting, grabbing, and of course, throwing chemicals which blind people. I don’t know that I’d recommend this for a general audience, but it’s short and original enough that it might be worth watching for genre fans. For me personally? Find something a little more polished and a little less morally troubling.

But Sightless is hardly a brave new frontier in horror films. I dislike horror movies that rely on disabilities as a plot point. It neglects the fact that millions of people cope just fine with a variety of conditions that cause them to live life differently; that not every “disability” is actually life-destroying. Films like this leave the impression that the real “scare” is just something that (in the real world) plenty of people can live and thrive with and I don’t like that the horror is focused on the disability itself. This just doesn’t sit well with me.