Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Perfect Sense Blu-ray Movie Review

A not quite perfect disaster-romance.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater May 22, 2012

First there was 2006's Children of Men, about the sudden inability of the human race to produce offspring, and then the self-explanatory Blindness in 2008. Now, Perfect Sense joins this short list of recent films about metaphorical pandemics with existential overtones, all of which owe a literary debt to Albert Camus' The Plague. And all three seem to express the same Joni Mitchell sentiment: "You don't know what you've got till it's gone." Perfect Sense, with it's too-clever title, takes this to the extreme—the fictional disease here robs victims of their senses, one at a time, until they're plunged blind into total darkness. You can imagine the disaster movie possibilities of a global catastrophe that essentially turns everyone into a Helen Keller, but Perfect Sense operates on a decidedly small scale, focusing on a single couple in Glasgow who begin their relationship just as the first symptoms strike. Written by Kim Fupz Aakeson and directed by Scottish filmmaker David Mackenzie (Young Adam), the film has startling moments of real beauty, but it also tends to take itself too seriously, with pretentious voiceovers that try much too hard to be profound.

Take the opening narration, set to documentary-style images from around the world: "There is darkness and there is light. There are men and there are women. There is food. There are restaurants. Disease. There is work, traffic, the days as we know them." This is meant to give us a sense of the fullness of human existence, but it just feels overstuffed, a poor imitation of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. Perfect Sense is better when it avoids poetic commentary and sticks with its main characters, but unfortunately, you'll have to cringe your way through four or five of these self-serious interludes throughout the film.

Ewan McGregor plays Michael, a chef at a posh restaurant and a total commitment-phobe. We meet him as he's politely asking a one night stand to leave his apartment: "I have a tough time sleeping with someone else in the bed." The oldest excuse in the book, and the woman doesn't buy it. Might Michael have some dark, dramatic secret that explains his unwillingness to connect with others? My lips are sealed, friends.

Susan (Casino Royale's sexy Eva Green), an epidemiologist, is having different love issues. She's just broken up with a fellow researcher (Stephen Dillane) and—finding it hard to move on—she's taken to wandering coastal salterns, throwing stones at seagulls to get over her anger. (Don't worry, she always misses.) Susan sets her romantic malaise aside, however, when hospitals around Europe start flooding with patients reporting the same weird symptoms—a sudden stab of inexplicable grief, followed by the complete loss of smell. No one has any clue what's causing it, but the disease is quickly deemed "Severe Olfactory Syndrome." Yes, S.O.S., which—I beg your pardon—is hilariously on-the-nose.

Michael and Susan meet-cute when he bums a cigarette off her—his restaurant is right below her flat—but this is no rom-com. The sexual tension of their first evening together goes slack when they both come down with the disease and spend the night crying in bed, waking up to an odorless world and an uneasy feeling about the future and one another. "Life goes on" is Perfect Sense's oft-repeated mantra, though, and much of the film is spent showing how people readjust and acclimate themselves to even the most trying circumstances. Faced with a clientele with diminished taste buds, Michael cooks spicier foods. And hoping beyond reason for a relationship better than her last one, Susan gives Michael a second chance. Everyone mourns the loss of linked associations between smell and memory, but other sensations are heightened. Sex. Dancing. Alcohol. "There's still pleasure in this world," Michael says.

What no one expects is that the disease will progress. Taste goes next, preceded by a hunger pang so intense it causes people to eat whatever's nearby. (Cue the gross-out montage of unhindered gluttony, featuring guzzled olive oil, munched lipstick, and butchers chomping down on raw meat.) Life again goes on, but it gets unavoidably harder once hearing—during a fit of uncontrollable rage—cuts out too. Chaos descends, and the film relies on a few too many stock footage clips of global conflict. Fires breaking out. Fistfights on the street. Cops in riot gear facing down angry protestors. You know the drill.

The ironic problem with Perfect Sense is that the film itself is bland. It's polished and well-acted and beautifully shot, but it feels uncommitted and simultaneously under and over-written. It doesn't fully work as a romance or a disease movie, a la Contagion or Outbreak. The panic-on-the-streets apocalyptic elements are half-assed, and Susan's job as an epidemiologist goes completely undeveloped. Once the premise is set up and the basics of the disease explained, she might as well be a barista for all that her professional knowledge plays into the plot. As for the love story, it suffers from repetition and a surplus of gooey sentiment. That said, Ewan McGregor and Eva Green are wonderful together, and I'll admit to being suckered in by the will-they-or-won't-they-find-each-other-in-time aspect of the finale. The film is very nearly saved by a few infectiously joyful scenes—like Susan and Michael taking a soapy bath together—but the only real cure would've been a stronger script.

Perfect Sense Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

IFC brings Perfect Sense to Blu-ray with a 1080p/AVC-encoded digital-to-digital transfer that looks true to source. Shot with Sony's CineAlta F35 high definition camera, the image has occasional trouble with low-light conditions, where noise spikes considerably, but brighter outdoor scenes have a satisfyingly filmic quality. Clarity varies similarly, with exterior shots revealing lots of fine detail in clothing and facial features, while interiors tend to look softer and muddier, though never distractingly so. The color palette switches depending on the mood too—some scenes have a warm, "happy" cast while others are bathed in blue—but either way, saturation is strong and contrast generally balanced. (Although you will notice some crushed blacks and blown-out highlights from time to time.) Most of the stock "disaster" footage is in standard definition, and there are a few shots that appear to have been filmed with a DSLR, as they exhibit a rolling shutter effect—where image appears to wobble—that's actually used intentionally. Besides some brief aliasing, I didn't spot any real encode issues, although it'd honestly be hard to see compression artifacts within the heavy source noise. There's no obvious banding or macroblocking, anyway, and no sign of edge enhancement or DNR. This is probably an accurate representation of the film, even if there are a few picture quality quirks.

Perfect Sense Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

More undeniably impressive is the film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, which features some surprisingly detailed and considered sound design. It starts by working environmental ambience into nearly every scene, using the entire soundscape. Seagulls squawking off in the distance. The busy clamor of a restaurant's kitchen. Rain pouring in the rear channels. Car horns blaring. Later in the film, when Susan and Michael are on the cusp of losing their hearing, the sensitivity of their ears temporarily spikes and there's a great moment when they can hear everything—church bells tolling, birds chirping, and myriad city sounds, all overlapping and mixing together. The film's soundtrack is syrupy and sometimes too forceful in trying to dictate how we feel about a certain scene, but it at least sounds wonderful, with textured violins, defined low-end, and clean highs. If I have one complaint—a minor one—it's that the dialogue can occasionally sound a hair low in the mix. Never to the extent that it's hard to understand what's being said, though. An uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 stereo track is also included, and the disc features optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles, which appear in bright yellow lettering.

Perfect Sense Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Featurette (1080p, 1:47): Yes, the featurette is shorter than the film's trailer. Also, it's mostly made up of clips from the trailer, with a few snippets of interviews with the director and cast.
• Trailer (1080p, 2:16)

Perfect Sense Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Metaphorically apocalyptic films have been showing up frequently lately—maybe it has to do with the Mayan calendar—but Perfect Sense feels late to the end-of-the-world party, with a premise that tries too hard to one-up 2008's Blindness. It's not a bad film, and it does feature a pair of excellent performances from its leads, but the script could've used some serious work. I have mixed emotions here. Do I wish Perfect Sense were better? Yes. Do I regret watching it? Not at all, and I'd say it's decent rental material for those interested in romances or the pandemic subgenre of disaster movies. IFC's Blu-ray release is short of bonus features, but it's otherwise solid, with a strong high definition transfer and a surprisingly immersive audio track.