Perfect Sense ***
Imagine losing your senses, one by one – a too terrifying prospect to contemplate. David Mackenzie’s new drama Perfect Sense plunges you into that nightmare, but suggests that the greatest sense of all, the sense of love, will prevail when everything else shuts down.
Set in an alternative Glasgow, chef Michael (Ewan McGregor) falls for a scientist called Susan (Eva Green) who lives opposite his restaurant. After some games and insecurities are played out, the pair eventually falls in love, just as the world epidemic begins to rob people of their sensory perceptions. The question is, can love prevail when all else fails?
Although flawed in conceptual parts and over indulgent and contrived in some emotional scenarios – bordering on the pretentious, Perfect Sense is a rather odd coupling of romance and art-house sci-fi that’s acutely visceral and profoundly thought provoking, purely in its main idea of losing our senses. It features restaurant scenes that mirror performance art and capture the decadence of those in The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover or the Dutch Golden Age of art, all giving a carnal slant to events as the animal survival instincts kick in and the civilised ones depart. These are some of the most exciting scenes to watch, like a burst of life in an otherwise intense bodily exploration between two lovers.
The film’s curiosity is the not only the highly surreal pairing of McGregor and Green, but also breaking through its depressingly apocalyptic nature is an intriguingly optimistic resilience, ignited by the power of love. It’s more apocalyptic romance than sci-fi fantasy tinged with rampant emotions. McGregor and Green have some chemistry, but not as much as such a story requires – though Green is ever engaging, outshining McGregor’s efforts in the film.
Another peculiarity comes with the inclusion of grainy, news-like ‘documented’ events of spreading desperation across India and around the world to give the pseudo-news-style element and wider global issue angle to the film, as well as an authentic edge. However, these clips sit rather uneasily beside the tone of the majority of the film, and feel like ‘add ins’ from another, making them redundant to the nice claustrophobic development of localised struggles that are reminiscent of such British films as 28 Days Later….
It is an intriguing idea to marry a turbulent love story with a disaster movie, but without a strong and convincing couple at the fore to begin with, Perfect Sense leaves both the relationship and apocalyptic parts woefully under-developed and lacking the explosive impact from either that is required. Although watchable, the only thing that succeeds is Mackenzie triggering our deepest, darkest fears of complete sensory malfunction, the premise of which would make another more terrifying film, if this were the focus. Perhaps then they could address why the sense of touch survived unscathed?
3/5 stars
By @FilmGazer
**WATCH THE TRAILER HERE
