At an intersection in front of a traffic light, a driver remains stopped after the light turns green, which annoys the other drivers. The man yells out that he has suddenly gone blind: his entire field of vision is a sea of whiteness. After another driver helps the blind man back to his apartment, the blind man knocks over a vase and cuts himself trying to pick up the pieces, then passes out on the couch until the blind man’s wife comes home and helps him clean up. It turns out that the person who drove the blind man home was a thief—he stole their car, so the blind man and his wife take a taxi to the eye doctor. The doctor is baffled: there’s seemingly nothing wrong with the blind man’s eyes, and his condition is unprecedented. The only option, the doctor admits, is to “wait and see.”
After the blind man’s appointment, the car-thief also suddenly goes blind, as does the doctor later that night. One of the doctor’s patients, a young woman wearing dark glasses for an eye infection, works as a prostitute and goes blind while having sex with a man at a hotel. Two different police officers escort the car-thief and the girl with the dark glasses back to their respective homes. Meanwhile, the doctor realizes that the blindness is highly contagious and he tells the doctor’s wife about his condition. The doctor then calls the Ministry of Health, which sets up a quarantine and sends an ambulance for the doctor. His wife insists on joining him—although she can still see, after boarding her husband’s ambulance, she pretends that she has just gone blind as well.
The Ministry of Health’s quarantine zone is set up in an abandoned psychiatric hospital guarded by armed soldiers. The doctor and his wife arrive first, followed by the first man who went blind, the man who stole his car, the girl with dark glasses, and a young boy with a squint who saw the eye doctor the previous day. The Government announces a long list of draconian rules that the internees must follow to protect the rest of the population from “the white sickness.” The concerned patients choose the doctor as their leader, but he refuses, worrying that future arrivals will reject his authority. Meanwhile, the car-thief and the first blind man get into a fight, and then nature calls: the little boy has to go to the bathroom, and so everyone lines up behind the doctor’s wife, who promises to lead them there despite having not told anyone that she can still see. The car-thief starts groping the girl with the glasses, who indignantly kicks him in the leg with her high heels. This leaves him with a nasty, bloody wound, which the doctor’s wife bandages as best she can.
In the morning, the doctor’s wife worries that she will have to care for everyone else. More patients arrive, including the first blind man’s wife and various minor characters who have briefly interacted with the protagonists (like the taxi-driver who drove the first blind man and his wife to the doctor). The car-thief’s wound is badly infected, and the doctor and his wife beg the soldiers for medicine, but they refuse. Another huge crowd of patients enters the hospital after lunch, and that night the desperately ill car-thief crawls out of the hospital to beg the soldiers for medicine. But he startles the soldier on duty, who shoots him dead, and the sergeant orders the blind internees to retrieve and bury the car-thief’s body. The blind internees manage to get a shovel from the soldiers and bury the car-thief’s corpse in a shallow grave. But when the soldiers enter the hospital to drop off the internees’ dinner, they come face-to-face with a group of hungry, blind internees waiting in the hall. Terrified, the soldiers massacre them indiscriminately, leaving nine dead. The doctor leads his ward in burying half of the dead, but the internees living in the ward next door refuse to bury the other half. Meanwhile, in the hospital’s filthy bathroom, the doctor breaks down when he realizes that he is “becoming an animal.”
The internees begin losing all sense of time and routine. The soldiers decide to leave the food outside the hospital rather than entering, but the blind get lost while they search for it. A bloodthirsty soldier nearly murders a terrified blind man, but the new sergeant on duty stops him. On this day, several hundred new internees move into the hospital and fight for beds. Some are forced to sleep in the hallways, and others are frightened to come across the pile of corpses in the hospital’s courtyard. Soon after this, the narrator notes that the hospital is now full and that the internees finally have enough food. One of the newcomers is another patient of the doctor’s, an old man with a black eyepatch who tells the others about the sad state of the city: the Government has failed to control the epidemic, and an escalating series of catastrophes followed. Much of the city is blind, public services are collapsing, and the city is littered with abandoned cars. The narrator suggests that the patients are better off in the hospital, where they “pass the time” by remembering what they last saw before going blind.
In its crowded state, the hospital has become unimaginably filthy, a result of broken plumbing and people’s inability to see who is defecating where. To address the situation, the doctor’s wife considers revealing that she can see—but before she can, a band of armed thugs starts controlling all the food and demanding that everyone else give up their valuables in exchange for rations. The group from the doctor’s ward reluctantly complies, but the thugs give them so little food that they begin to starve. The doctor’s wife realizes she alone can stop the thugs, so she secretly surveys their ward at night. While the internees grow more and more desperate, the thugs start demand “more money and valuables” and then start systematically raping the women.
Overcome by anxiety, the women from the doctor’s ward wait their turn to be assaulted. In a moment of weakness, the doctor and the girl with the dark glasses have sex—the doctor’s wife witnesses this, but she comforts them rather than objecting. The girl and the old man with the eyepatch also begin a romantic relationship. One night, the thugs call over the ward’s seven women and violently rape them for several hours, leaving them battered and traumatized beyond words—one of them dies moments after the attack ends, and the doctor’s wife washes her corpse to “purify” it. Soon, the doctor’s wife realizes that she has no choice but to act. A few nights later, she grabs a pair of scissors she has been hiding and follows another group of women into the thugs’ ward, where she stabs the leader in the throat, killing him and causing a frantic struggle. After escaping with the women, she struggles to process what she has done.
After the leader’s death, the thugs lose their grip on power, but they keep their stockpile of food. New food stops arriving, and without assistance from the soldiers, some of the starving internees decide that they were better off under the thugs’ rule. The internees try and fail to attack the thieves, who have blocked the entrance to their ward with several beds. The doctor’s wife desperately reveals that she can see, and then an unnamed woman decides to take matters into her own hands: she sets fire to the beds in the thugs’ doorway, and the whole ward burns down with the thugs inside. The entire hospital ends up catching fire, and the patients run outside, only to find that the soldiers are gone—in fact, the whole city is eerily silent and dark. Disoriented and confused, the internees spend the night next to the burning hospital, hoping in vain that the soldiers will return with food.
In the morning, the blind internees are free but lost and starving. The doctor’s wife guides a small group—herself and her husband, the girl with the glasses, the man with the eyepatch, the first blind man and his wife, and the boy with the squint—into town, where blind people are taking shelter in shops. One of them explains that the entire country is now blind and that people spend their days scavenging for food. The doctor’s wife goes looking for food and finds a supermarket, which is full of people but empty of food. Luckily, she discovers a basement storeroom and fills several bags with food. On her way out, she decides not to inform the blind scavengers about it, and then she gets lost and breaks down crying. Then, a stray dog rescues the doctor’s wife by licking up her tears and showing her to “a great map” that leads her home. This “dog of tears” joins her adopted family.
Now well-fed and well-dressed, the group goes to girl’s old apartment, which is nearby. Her parents are gone, but her downstairs neighbor, an elderly blind woman, has managed to stay and survive by eating whatever she finds in the backyard, including raw chickens and rabbits. This woman has keys to the girl’s apartment and opens it for the group in exchange for some of their food. The group spends the night there, but the next afternoon they move to the doctor and his wife’s apartment, which is exactly as they left it. Here, “the seven pilgrims” make themselves at home: the doctor’s wife helps them clean up, and during a rainstorm in the morning, the women bathe themselves and wash everybody’s clothes on the balcony. Later that day, the doctor’s wife leads the first blind man and his wife to their old apartment, where a blind writer is now living. Although he cannot read his own work, the writer continues working so as to not lose himself.
The doctor, his wife, and the girl with the glasses then visit the doctor’s office, which has been ransacked, and then return to the girl’s apartment to again check for her parents. They pass a speaker preaching to a crowd about the apocalypse, and when they arrive, they find the old woman laying dead outside, clutching the girl’s keys. The doctor’s wife buries the old woman, and then the girl leaves a lock of her hair on her front doorknob, in case her parents return. Back at the doctor and his wife’s apartment, the doctor’s wife reads the rest of the group a story, and the girl with the glasses and the old man with the eyepatch reaffirm their love for each other.
Later on, the doctor and his wife visit the supermarket in search of food. Accompanied by the dog of tears, they pass another preacher speaking to a blind crowd, this time about law and government. In the supermarket’s basement storeroom, the doctor’s wife is horrified to find a pile of dead bodies and realizes that after she left the last time, the blind scavengers rushed downstairs, fell, and accidentally got locked inside. Feeling nauseated and overwhelmed with guilt, the doctor’s wife follows her husband across the street into a crowded church, where she passes out. When the doctor’s wife regains consciousness, she realizes that the eyes in all the images in the church are covered with paint or strips of cloth, and she and the doctor debate what this symbolizes. When the blind worshippers around them hear this, they riot and run out of the church, and the doctor and his wife take some of the food they leave behind.
Back in their apartment, the doctor’s wife reads a book to the group. As she reads, the first blind man suddenly regains his sight, and the entire group begins rejoicing. By the next morning, all of them can see again, and the city is full of people celebrating on the streets. The doctor proclaims that all humans are “Blind people who can see, but do not see.”
