Blind review: a dark story illuminated by a dazzling central performance

Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) has recently gone completely blind, but as her opening voiceover explains, she’s working hard to retain mental images, as that capacity will fade with time. Working hard, we soon learn, means composing all kinds of elaborate and highly sexualised fantasies. Her husband, she imagines, spies on her when he is supposed to be at work. But that’s just the beginning.

Ingrid turns her attention to another couple: Einar (Marius Kolbenstvedt) an isolated pornography-junkie who watches his young neighbour, a single mother called Elin (Vera Vitali).

What is going on here? Are these people real or imagined? Is Ingrid’s husband cheating on her? And where exactly do Einar and Elin fit in with Ingrid’s own marital problems? In common with Einar, Ingrid has shut herself away from the world since losing her sight. But we’re deep into Ingrid’s fiction – or, more accurately, fictions – before we start to make the relevant connections.

Using match-cuts and duplicates, writer-director Eskil Vogt bobs and weaves through these narrative strands. An initially discombobulating plot congeals into a lovely, fluid flight of fancy.

Taking colour cues from its heroine's platinum hair, Dogtooth DOP Thimios Bakatakis has fashioned a bleached and impressionistic aesthetic. And star Ellen Dorrit Petersen is every bit as dazzling as the cinematography.