Perfect Sense

Directed by David MacKenzie. Starring Ewan McGregor, Eva Green, Connie Nielsen, Ewen Bremner, Stephen Dillane 15A cert, general release, 90 min

SUSAN (EVA GREEN), a Glasgow epidemiologist, is perplexed when a colleague leads her into an observation chamber at the hospital.

The symptoms described by the patient – he pulls his truck over to the side of the road, weeping uncontrollably, then reports a complete loss of smell – sound straightforwardly psychosomatic. Except they’re not: people all over Europe are succumbing to the same sequence.

Michael (Ewan McGregor), the chef next door, provides the perplexed doctor with a distraction from the contagion. But it soon becomes clear that no one on earth has an olfactory future. Michael’s restaurant adjusts the menu in favour of stronger, compensatory flavours, and normality momentarily returns to a bouquet-free Scotland. Then comes a hunger, followed by a complete loss of taste.

Is this global epidemic confined to the chemical senses? Or is there worse to come? David McKenzie’s high-concept, lo-fi sci-fi cleverly confines its grand scope within a modern, alienated romance. Michael and Susan’s halting, stuttering relationship often feels like another manifestation of the coming disassociated plague.

Throughout, Green’s portentous voiceover over episodic bits of montage outlines the importance of sensorial experience. The narration is almost as superfluous as the many close-up shots of the star’s breasts, but the neatness of the central premise holds up.

At its best, indeed, Perfect Sense shares DNA with such similarly themed projects as One Hundred Mornings and Monsters, wherein the apocalypse takes a backseat to comparatively puny human concerns. Tight framing and focus conceals a limited budget and is entirely in keeping with the About Adamdirector's murky milieu.

Unlike, say, Fernando Meirelles's underrated Blindness,David Mackenzie's film trades on a very British rapture. No efforts are spared in getting on with it. Newscasts from around the world depict doomsday cults and riots, but in Glasgow it's business as usual until the pandemic delivers a cruel, final blow.

TARA BRADY