Perfect Sense (2011) – Film Review
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Anyone who has seen the recent trailer release would think this film is nothing more than an intense love story. Is this to entice people to come and see it or to distract them from what the film is really about? Perfect Sense, directed by David Mackenzie, is an apocalyptic love story set in Glasgow where a chef and a scientist start to fall in love just as the world is falling apart.
Ewan McGregor stars as Michael, the chef, who has, in the course of his life, had some disastrous relationships. He loves his job and enjoys meeting women. Susan, played by Eva Green, is the scientist who has her own emotional boundaries and relationship struggles. The pair meet just as an unexplainable epidemic hits the world, robbing people of their senses.
After their first night together they both suffer from an overwhelming sense of loss that causes them to cry and feel more than they have ever done before. This then results in them realising their sense of smell has gone. Soon to follow is taste, which begins with everyone suffering from ravenous bouts of hunger, eating everything from flowers to lipsticks – basically anything and everything they can see. As the film progresses you realise they are losing their senses one by one and you watch as the world soon descends into chaos and mass hysteria.
Perfect Sense is, to put it bluntly, a weird film. There are many things within it that make you question what you are watching and why exactly you are watching it. The characters of Michael and Susan, despite being a very beautiful couple, are difficult to warm or connect to and their parts are also overacted. Green is cold, distant, often whining and is confusingly childlike. To add to the confusion, she, an epidemiologist, spends most of her time with Michael or with her sister instead of working to find out what is causing the epidemic.
The film is long and rather slow-paced and, because of this, it only enhances more strange things that cannot be explained. An example of this is where Michael and Susan suddenly eat a bar of soap whilst sharing a bath. They eat the soap despite losing their sense of taste and knowing they shouldn’t eat soap, adding another strange and unnecessary addition to the film. Overall Perfect Sense is a very strange and grim oddity that evokes the wrong reaction.
Best scene: The ravenous eating.
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