Release Date:    February 3, 2012
Genres:    Drama, Romance, Thriller, Science Fiction
Directed By:    David Mackenzie
Produced By:    Gillian Berrie, Malte Grunert
Starring:    Ewan McGregor, Eva Green
Written By:    Kim Fupz Aakeson
Distributed By:    IFC Films
Running Time:    90 minutes
Country:    United Kingdom
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Eva Green and Connie Nielsen
Language:    English

In Perfect Sense, there’s a possible global pandemic which may just be the End Times. It begins with people being hit with an intense emotional sadness, balling over into crying lumps, and when they dry their eyes, they no longer have their sense of smell. Further emotion/sense symptoms follow from there. Some people will already be out with this emotional aspect — they’ll find it silly. And it is a little silly. Others will be pissed that questions about this pandemic go unanswered. How did it start? How did it spread? How does it work? Is there an immunity or a cure. Not the point.

The film is a poetic romance, with these possible End Times and humanity’s capability to adapt and survive serving as a background. If you understand this going in, you’re far more likely to enjoy the film, if you’re into relationship movies. Susan (Eva Green) is an epidemiologist in Glasgow studying this thing that’s going on in the world, and she’s also getting over a recent heartbreak. Mike (Ewan McGregor) is a chef at a restaurant near Susan’s flat, and he’s a cad with no apparent intent to get into a serious relationship. But they end up sharing an intense emotional night as a result of this pandemic, and an eventual relationship slowly blossoms.

That’s the film, tracking both Susan and Mike’s relationship and, to a lesser extent, the global effect of this pandemic that is stripping people of their senses (paired with additional emotional outbursts). As people lose their senses, they largely adapt, cope and carry on with their lives, and we particularly see this through Mike. How does a chef and his restaurant adapt and cook for people who can’t smell or, worse yet, have no sense of taste? There are periodic voiceover monologues which provide further exposition about the pandemic and its emotional and sense-stripping symptoms, and showing the global-wide effects.

Again, I realize the emotional aspect of this pandemic is silly when written out, and sometimes a little silly on the screen. But overall, it tees up some important and strong beats in Susan and Mike’s growing relationship, and it allows McGregor and Green to do a lot with their roles. (And yes, both of them show their naughty bits). The rest of the cast is solid, too, although they’re given a lot less to work with, and Ewan Bremner (playing a friend and colleague of Mike’s) gets a special hat-tip.

The movie is beautifully shot, aside from a few handheld shots that felt out of place, and carries a continuing and growing sense of dread and eventual heartbreak, even while showing the growth of this relationship between Mike and Susan. Perfect Sense is neither a fun nor comfortable movie to watch, nor is it a perfect movie, but it is a very good, emotional film.

Perfect Sense, formerly known as The Last Word, is a 2011 drama film directed by David Mackenzie and written by Kim Fupz Aakeson, starring Eva Green and Ewan McGregor. Scenes were shot in various locations around Glasgow. The film premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. A story about two people - a chef and an epidemiologist - who fall in love just as an epidemic begins to rob the world's population of their sensory perceptions. Reviews for Perfect Sense have been mixed.

David Mackenzie is the smart and interesting director who made Young Adam. His LA satire Spread was an underrated film I enjoyed a lot. But he really has been showing us some baffling stuff recently and this movie, about two people finding love as the world comes to an end, is sublimely and uncompromisingly daft. Ewan McGregor is on complacent form playing a sexy chef called Michael, and Eva Green is Susan, a preposterous medical scientist.

They fall for each other, just as everyone in the world succumbs to a global virus that, among other bizarre symptoms, causes them to lose their sensory perceptions. One of the symptoms is frantic hunger. Another is ferocious rage. The results look worryingly like the food-poisoning scenes in the Zucker/Abrahams classic Airplane!, when the symptoms turn out to be severe muscle spasms, followed by the inevitable drooling, and then uncontrollable flatulence. McGregor gobbles frantically in his "hunger" scene, and when it comes to her "rage" moment, Green does a lot of paranoid gibbering before freaking

A hit at Sundance '11 and winner of the Ediburgh Film Festival's prize for Best New British Feature, the amazing genre creation directed by David Mackenzie stars Eva Green and Ewan McGregor as witnesses to the end of the world-- strangers who form a desperate romantic connection in the face of an apocalyptic epidemic of sensory loss

Don McKellar’s neglected Last Night (1998) offered an intimate view of the end of the world, dramatising Armageddon through the full spectrum of human reactions, from civilised acceptance to sexual abandon.

The same could be said of the McKellar-scripted Blindness, which, ironically, more people saw. Combining elements of both with his usual desolate eroticism, director David Mackenzie’s (Hallam Foe) latest is set in a stricken Glasgow, where a mysterious disease strips sad new lovers Eva Green and Ewan McGregor of their humanity one sense at a time.

It’s a rich contrast – the heightened emotions of falling for someone paralleled with sudden jarring losses of feeling – particularly as McGregor is a chef. “Without smell, an ocean of past images disappears,” intones the anonymous narrator.

Soon, McGregor begins serving noisy, brightly coloured food to compensate. Later, when taste disappears too, we see him and Green naked in the bath chugging shaving cream for kicks.

The message is stark: to be human is to adapt. Or, perhaps – as kids cry in sweet shops, grown men chew raw meat and martial law is declared – to be human is to always want more. It’s a film thick with melancholy.

From the desolate docks to its lonely back streets, Glasgow has never felt so austere. But there’s hope here too. McGregor and Green’s hearts may be broken but their bodies are alive; the chemistry they fire up offers the frisson of visceral, believable human connection.

True, some will find Perfect Sense pretentious – laughable, even. But even at its most unlikely, you’ll root for the duo to go the distance.