Perfect Sense

A global epidemic takes people's senses one at a time. Each loss is preceded by a wave of feeling: uncontrollable weeping before smell goes, panic and gluttony before taste, extreme anger before hearing. Meanwhile an epidemiologist and a chef fall in love. David Mackenzie directed, from a screenplay by Kim Fupz Aakeson. Ewan McGregor and Eva Green star. The script was originally called The Last Word and set in Copenhagen; after Mackenzie joined it moved to Glasgow. Filming also took place in Mexico City and Kenya. It premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. In the UK it opened in 59 cinemas and took roughly 21,675 pounds on its first weekend. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 57 percent. Critics split: some tired of a narrator explaining the themes, others wrote that the flurry of emotion before each deprivation produces the film's most vivid sequences. Who it is for: viewers who want an apocalypse read through a love story. Who it is not for: anyone wanting scientific coherence. How the epidemic works is never explained and the film is not troubled by that.