Amy Benic (Mira Sorvino) takes a vacation at a spa outside New York City. Virgil Adamson (Val Kilmer) is a masseur at the spa and gives Amy a massage. Amy inexplicably cries and Virgil comforts her. While complimenting Virgil on the massage, Amy realizes that Virgil is blind. Virgil asks her out, and the two eventually begin a relationship.
In an unnamed city, a young Japanese professional (Yusuke Iseya) is suddenly struck blind for no apparent reason. The Japanese man is approached by a few concerned people, one of whom (Don McKellar) offers to drive him home, and later steals his car. The blinded man describes his sudden affliction: an expanse of dazzling white, as though he is "swimming in milk".
Emma is a young musician who has been blind for 20 years. New surgery techniques restore her vision but initially cause "vision flashes" that leave her uncertain about what she sees. One night, she is awakened by a noise in the apartment above. Peeking out her door, she "sees" a figure descending the stairs. She contacts the police, worried that her neighbor has been murdered, but is unsure if it was just her new vision deceiving her. The killer then begins to stalk Emma.
Val Waxman (Allen) is a one-time prestigious film director lately reduced to overseeing cheesy television commercials in order to pay his bills and support his current live-in girlfriend (Debra Messing). When he is thrown off his latest effort (a deodorant commercial being filmed in the frozen north), he desperately seeks a real movie project.
The film begins with the death of the blind Sara, who appears to be being tormented by an unseen stranger. Heading to her basement to attempt suicide, she curses the hidden tormentor and refuses to give them the satisfaction of seeing her hang herself; but as she tries to remove the noose from her neck, the stool beneath her is kicked away, leaving her to die. Miles away, Sara's twin sister Julia collapses at work, sensing something amiss with her sister.
In Rome, in the 1980s, famous Italian film director Salvatore Di Vita returns home late one evening, where his girlfriend sleepily tells him that his mother called to say someone named Alfredo has died. Salvatore obviously shies from committed relationships and has not been to his home village of Giancaldo, Sicily in 30 years. As his girlfriend asks him who Alfredo is, Salvatore flashes back to his childhood.
Former Los Angeles policeman John Berlin is teetering toward burnout after the collapse of his marriage. At the invitation of an old friend and colleague, Freddy Ross, Berlin heads to rural northern California, for a job with the Eureka police force. Instead, Berlin prickles his new colleagues, especially John Taylor, who was passed over for promotion in order to make room for Berlin.
In a Montreal apartment, a woman named Lisa (Samantha Jones) waits for an old man to sew bags of heroin into the cloth body of an old-fashioned doll. As she leaves the apartment with the doll, we see the man watching her leave, then dialing someone on the phone. Lisa takes the doll with her on an airline flight to New York City, but when, on disembarking, she sees a man watching her, she becomes worried and gives the doll for safekeeping to a man she'd spoken with on the plane, professional photographer Sam Hendrix (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.). The man who'd been watching Lisa then roughly escorts her away. Later, when Lisa calls Sam about the doll, Sam and his wife, Susy (Audrey Hepburn), who is blind from an auto accident, are unable to find it.
The film begins with Michelle McNally (Rani Mukerji), a blind and deaf woman, visiting her former teacher Debraj Sahai (Amitabh Bachchan), who now has Alzheimer's disease, in a hospital. The film then flashbacks to the past to her childhood.
Selina D'Arcey (Elizabeth Hartman) is a blind girl living with her prostitute mother Rose-Ann (Shelley Winters) and grandfather Ole Pa (Wallace Ford), in a city apartment. She strings beads to supplement her family's small income, and spends most of her time doing chores. Her mother is abusive, and Ole Pa is an alcoholic. Selina has no friends, rarely leaves the apartment, and has never received an education.
In the San Francisco of the 1970s, Don Baker (Edward Albert), who was born blind, has lived all his life with his mother (Eileen Heckart). Don moves out into an apartment on his own, but Don finds himself all alone. He has made a contract that his mother will not come to see him for at least two months.
The officials of a city unveil a new statue, only to find The Tramp sleeping on it. They shoo him away and he wanders the streets, destitute and homeless, and is soon tormented by two newsboys. He happens upon a beautiful Flower Girl (Virginia Cherrill), not realizing at first that she is blind, and buys a flower. Just when she is about to give him his change, a man gets into a nearby luxury car and is driven away, making her think that the Tramp has departed. The Tramp tiptoes away.
Having escaped the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Countess Sofia Belinskaya is working as a taxi dancer in a seedy Shanghai bar to support her family of White émigrés, including her daughter Katya, her mother-in-law Olga, her sister-in-law Grushenka, and an aunt and uncle by marriage, Princess Vera and Prince Peter. Despite the fact employment is scarce and her meagre income is the family's only source of revenue, Sofia's once-aristocratic relatives scorn her for her choice of profession and insist she keep it a secret from her child.