Blind Sun Review (Film, 2015) #31DaysOfHorror
content warning: racism, nudity, sexual content, blood, animal death
An immigrant is hired to take care of a villa during a particularly nasty heatwave. He doesn’t even make it into town before a police officer stops him and steals his paperwork to teach him a lesson. As the temperatures rise, the town becomes more hostile to the man.
Blind Sun is a horror film about racism. Ashraf is treated like an outsider by everyone. Even his employers don’t exactly trust him, setting particularly arbitrary boundaries about what he can do while living and caring for their property. The more he interacts with people, the more aggressive they become.
The people who don’t immediately react with fear or hatred still treat him as a sort of curiosity. They want to know little things about him. They compliment how he speaks one language to mock him for his fluency in another. He’s a puzzle to them, a mystery to solve for their own enjoyment.
Writer/director Joyce A. Nashawati’s Blind Sun is a beautiful film. The use of color and light is stunning. The contrast between the seawater that surrounds the town and the utterly destroyed landscapes is pure cinematic tension. This is a psychological horror story told with a lot of style in bright sunlight. The right angle can still cast a shadow, and the reach of racism in this community doesn’t even need to hide in the dark.
Blind Sun is a slow burn horror film. The tension slowly builds as Ashraf becomes convinced someone is following him. Something might fall over in the house unexpectedly. There might be a quick glimpse of a shadow against a wall. The security gates and surveillance footage should stop any unwanted entry to the house, but the little disturbances quickly build to actual destruction.
It’s a layered narrative of suggestion and suspicion. Ashraf can only live under the constant watch of everyone in the town for so long before he starts to fall to the same kind of suspicions. He wants to trust people, believe in what’s good in them, but every interaction he’s had with the town since entering is designed to break his trust in humanity. The story is tense and tragic in equal measure.
Blind Sun plays with a lot of expectations in horror to strong effect. The terror comes in broad daylight; relative safety, at night. The threats are made clear at the start, but slowly twist and turn to more unpredictable places as the story goes on.
Blind Sun is playing on Shudder.
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