Perfect Sense is fifteen years old, and it has quietly become a far harder film to watch than it was ever designed to be. A chef and an epidemiologist meet in Glasgow just as an epidemic begins moving through the population, taking one sense at a time. The losses arrive in waves, each one announced by a surge of feeling that hits everyone at once.
It was not always a Scottish film. Kim Fupz Aakeson wrote the script set in Copenhagen, and it relocated to Glasgow when David Mackenzie came aboard, which turns out to matter enormously. Mackenzie shoots the city as a working place, all wet streets and restaurant kitchens, so the apocalypse arrives in a setting too ordinary to feel spectacular. It carried a different name for a while too, The Last Word, which would have been a much worse fit.
Ewan McGregor and Eva Green are the whole architecture. The film asks them to fall in love repeatedly, under conditions that keep getting worse, and the trick is that the romance never functions as a distraction from the premise. Each loss forces a new way of being together. That is a genuinely good idea, and the film is disciplined about following it.
It premiered at Sundance in January and reached UK screens that fall, a long and awkward walk for a film this small, and it never quite found the audience it needed on the way. Some of that is the tone. It is solemn in a way that can tip into portent, and the narration occasionally explains what the images have already made clear.
Mackenzie went on to make Hell or High Water, and the same instinct is visible here: big genre machinery pointed at very small human behavior. Ninety three minutes, and the last stretch earns everything the setup spends.
