Film review: Perfect Sense

The film’s focus is Glasgow, and in particular a couple played by Ewan McGregor and Eva Green, whose relationship starts up just as their senses are shutting down. Since he’s a chef and she’s a doctor, they are on the frontline.

When taste and smell disappear, McGregor worries that his restaurant will go out of business. And as an epidemiologist, you’d think that Green would be putting in long hours at the lab – but instead she self-prescribes long periods pondering past romantic failures and her childlessness, in a manner that is supposed to inspire sympathy but eventually makes you wish she’d take a dose of Get A Grip medicine.

Usually when an apocalypse looms, the focus is on Bruce Willis and his chums trying to blast that pesky asteroid off its collision course, but Mackenzie and his scriptwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson laudably take a different tack. This is a study of people in denial – or at least people who manage to improvise around deprivation.

When smell and taste vanish, food is re-evaluated in terms of texture and intensity instead. When hearing goes, some study sign language, and others try to re-experience their favourite music through vibration.

Perfect Sense takes an optimistic slant: even when faced with catastrophic loss, human beings will try to make the best of what is left by developing coping or compensatory mechanisms. Well yes, but surely there would still be more chaos, craziness and sheer blind panic than this movie imagines. Apart from some smashed pots and scattered litter, the madness experienced here is brief, and usually an emotional prelude to a loss of a sense. Before smell disappears, people weep uncontrollably. Before losing taste, they guzzle indiscriminately, anything from whole fish to flowers.

Moreover, for a film with such a life-affirming theme, Perfect Sense is unbelievably draining to sit through, and as it dragged past the one-hour mark, I found myself heartlessly counting down the senses until the film ended.

Chicly shot and edited, and pretty much art-directed to death, Mackenzie’s movie is curiously underwhelming and unbearably pretentious. Although it guns for epic resonance, it’s closer to sixth-form poetry – sincere and earnest, but also fatally ponderous and attracted to cliché.

The psychologies are shallow, and while McGregor and Green make an attractive couple, the characters are badly underwritten and horribly overacted. Despite their shared baths and beds, there’s no sense that they connect with each other, or us.

Some people may be touched by Perfect Sense, but I suspect that it’s the universal themes of love, bonding and deprivation that will haunt you after the credits roll, not the film itself.

On general release from Friday

PERFECT SENSE (15)

Director: David Mackenzie

Running time: 92 minutes

Rating **