Perfect Sense (review)

David Mackenzie’s 2011 Sundance selection Perfect Sense has garnered relatively little attention, but deserves notice as an unusual plague movie. It is a film that posits intimate equanimity after excess and deprivation in a world undergoing apocalyptic change; as such, it is a text that speaks to material turns in contemporary criticism and theory, including the science-fictional grotesque as articulated by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay and others, as well as studies in transcorporeality by such figures as ecocritic Stacy Alaimo.

Apocalyptic cinema usually generates viewer involvement from the contrast between spectacular terror and stock characters feeling stock emotions. Special effects and the horizon of expectations regarding how characters will react and whether and how they will survive compass viewers through a formulaic journey – and, of course, the characters usually do survive. Perfect Sense eschews this approach by focusing tightly on the protagonists, neither of whom are especially likable, at least early on. Perfect Sense presents the love story of a chef, Michael (Ewan McGregor), and a scientist, Susan (Eva Green), as they confront relentless loss. The film’s novum is innovative: what comes to be recognised as a pandemic more or less simultaneously robs humans of one sense perception at a time. This loss is preceded by a collective maniacal intensification of some aspect of that sensation and/or an accompanying emotion. Prior to losing hearing, for example, characters become enraged, acting and speaking from their worst selves. Michael, previously shown to be a cold sexual player, screams at Susan, who, until meeting Michael, had buried her feelings in her work. The two have developed a connection – they are falling in love – but rage overtakes Michael, accusing Susan of being like all his prior conquests: ‘You’re just a pair of ears and a mouth and an asshole and a cunt … Everyone else is that too.’ Earlier, prior to losing the sense of taste, people experience terror at mortality, then binge on anything at hand: lipstick, hot sauce, raw fish, gallons of olive oil, hothouse flowers. These sense orgies are more disturbing than crashing aliens, bloody spills or exploding buildings. The body itself is the locus of the end of the world. Even the apocalypse – especially the apocalypse – is about skin. Because of this humanistic core, Perfect Sense has the feel of a tale that might have been written by Theodore Sturgeon or later-period Robert Silverberg.

Despite its surprising novum, the film is desultory when it comes to science. Susan, an epidemiologist, is one of the researchers trying to understand the unexplained epidemic. But the film pays little attention to enacting scenes of scientific method. There is an initial study of the first Glasgow patient who has lost his sense of smell, meetings inside Susan’s hospital, brief discussions of this or that theory. The somewhat janky hospital with a few sad cages of mice and rabbits is not crucial to the narrative except to heighten suspense – every brief time we see them working, we see that these researchers are in over their heads. Unlike a standard-issue Hollywood blockbuster, this film has little interest in exploring the pandemic’s origins, protocols to halt its spread, or possible therapies. This is a miniature, then, and science is mostly an off-camera pursuit that we can sense will fail precisely because it is so elided.

More vivid are scenes in Michael’s restaurant where, for example, patrons who cannot smell or taste food come to appreciate presentations based on colour, size, shape and texture. And mostly it is the love story we pay attention to, with scenes of Susan and Michael listening to a street musician who uses storytelling and violin-playing to conjure memories of smells; Susan and Michael daring each other to reveal secrets they have not told anyone else, resulting in declarations of flaws so significant that Susan declares the two of them deserve the title ‘Mr and Mrs Asshole’; the lovers in a bathtub, eating soap and laughing.

Shocks to the quotidian and the physical and...