At the beginning of the film a Japanese man stops driving in the middle of traffic, saying he is blind. Another guy gets out to help him, but ends up stealing his car. Later, that thief goes blind. Once the Japanese guy is home in his apartment, his wife takes him to the eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo), who is puzzled. Rather than seeing darkness, this man is claiming he is just seeing white. The next morning the Doctor wakes up blind--and soon all the people who saw the previous day in his office are blind as well, with this "White disease".
Society goes into a panic and quickly quarantines all of the newly blind people, basically dumping them in a prison type setting to fend for themselves. There are no doctors or sighted helpers. Just guards standing outside the buildings, threatening to shoot anyone who tries to leave. Overcrowded, one ward decides to control the other wards and one blind thug even gets a gun. And the more powerful group decides to take all the food, only rationing it out when the women from the other groups agree to have sex with them. It's like LORD OF THE FLIES with blind people.
Towards the end, when they discover the guards are gone, they break through the barricades to find that everyone else in the city is blind. It's everyone for themselves. There are some impressive shots of the city, is trash everywhere, people scrounging, rats, and pets eating their dead owner's bodies. I kept on waiting for the TRIFFIDS to show up but had to remind myself that's another movie.