Grit in the Windy City

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The suspense is not as tightly wound as it might be. The mystery is not as deep or, when unraveled, as stunning as it could be. The detective (Aidan Quinn) is a little more crudely macho than he needs to be.

But all that is unimportant, for Blink has two terrific things going for it. One is director Michael Apted's gritty use of Chicago as a setting. He makes you feel the wind in your bones, and he puts its blue-collar toughness in your face all the time. The other is Madeleine Stowe.

Her intensity was visible but somewhat shaded in Short Cuts and The Last of the Mohicans. In Blink she lets it rip. Emma Brody, blinded in early childhood, plays the violin in an Irish rock band, and onstage she looks ethereal. Offstage her anger is like an exposed nail; it catches and tears at everyone who brushes against it. As the result of an operation, Emma begins to recover her sight, and curiously that renders her vulnerable. A world of blurs and shadows is scarier to her than the darkness she has known. One of these developing shadows, as it happens, is that of the man who murdered her upstairs neighbor. This means, of course, that he is going to stalk her.

She covers her fear with ferocity and blistering outrage at the ineptitude of the cops on the case. When she becomes romantically involved with Quinn, their love scenes have the scratch-and-bite fury that people generate when they are not at all sure they're doing the right thing. Whatever she's doing, however, Stowe transforms an ordinary sort of movie into something extraordinary.