Perfect Sense (2011)

Perfect Sense arrives with a premise that any number of contemporary filmmakers would have seized upon as an allegory: a plague that strips humanity of smell, taste, hearing, and finally sight, spreading across a globalized world. David Mackenzie declines the invitation. The film is a love story between a chef and an epidemiologist in Glasgow, and it stays that way. The cast is white to a degree that reads as an accident of British financing rather than a statement, with a single South Asian performer in a minor role and no visible effort to assemble a diverse ensemble. Eva Green's Susan is a capable scientist, but her competence is character detail, not a thesis. There is no LGBTQ presence, no racial commentary, no environmental reading of the contagion. The disease is not the planet's revenge. It is simply a condition.

The restaurant setting, which might have invited some critique of labor or wealth, remains a workplace. Nobody eats the rich here; the kitchen staff cook for customers who can no longer taste. The body is treated as a site of loss, not of affirmation, and no character is marked as neurodivergent. In place of social messaging, the film offers a narrator. An unseen voice intones about the meaning of things and the primacy of love, and critics were right to find it preachy. The sermonizing is existential, however, aimed at the human condition in general. It lectures us about grief and connection, not about politics.

The result is an unusually old-fashioned apocalypse, closer to a somber romance than to any cultural argument. That may be to its credit as drama. As a document of contemporary progressive sensibilities, it is nearly blank. The film asks what we would keep when the senses go, and answers: each other. This is a lovely sentiment and a thoroughly un-modern one.