Film Reviews

Perfect Sense

• Rating:
• Director: David McKenzie
• Starring: Connie Nielsen
• Details: UK/Denmark / 92mins (15A).

With two films released in a matter of weeks, David McKenzie has been a busy boy – Perfect Sense fares a lot better than You Instead, but there is a certain frustration that there was a better movie to be had considering the oddball story. Narrated in retrospect by Eva Green's scientist, Perfect Sense plays out like a prequel to a chilling post-apocalyptic drama but, peculiarly, is delivered in a deadpan, matter-of-fact manner. Don't go thinking Outbreak or 28 Days Later.
There's a global epidemic afoot: following a bout of depression – "people are suddenly hit with everything they've lost… all the people they've hurt…" – people are losing their sense of smell. Shortly, after experiencing a fiendish desire for food, their sense of taste is also lost. As Green prepares for the loss of the rest of the senses, she embarks on a relationship with commitment-phobe chef McGregor, whose restaurant is suffering from the crisis as people are staying home...
It's an odd idea for a movie. Usually, this kind of story is covered in a pre-credit sequence where one man/woman is left to wander the deserted streets as they come to terms with the devastation of the world's population. Working on what must have been a minimal budget, McKenzie can't go for grandiose money shots and is reduced to toppling a car or two and scattering rubbish about the place. The director takes the global problem and makes it personal, concentrating on the little world McGregor and Green have created for themselves as they try to make sense of it all.
Perfect Sense can veer close to the ridiculous at times – it might have sounded great on paper, but watching a bunch of actors scramble over each other as they eat mustard from a jar, a bouquet of flowers and live rabbits as they succumb to an 'eating rage' looks silly. Somehow, though, McKenzie pulls the film back from the brink and gets the audience back on the board with the characters' plight. There are touches of brilliance too: when hearing vanishes, the director has no qualms spending ten minutes of the film in silence. It's an eerie sequence.
McKenzie leaves a lot unsaid too: the why and the how this is happening is left unchartered and why Green, who specialises in these kind of things, doesn't actually work hard at figuring it out, preferring instead to fall into bed with McGregor.
Odd but being a bit different, regardless of the end result, is always welcome.

Review by Gavin Burke