Perfect Sense

The person who wrote the official distributor’s text must have lost all his senses (including his sixth sense), but mainly his common sense. Or else deep down he must really hate this movie. Which is equally as unlikely as someone sincerely loving Perfect Sense; originality and form are pushed too much at the expense of everything else for somebody to love this. It is more interesting (and has too many loose ends) than actually good; but luckily it is interesting in just the right way. (10/03/2012)

Perfect Sense beautifully intertwines two storylines. One romantic between Ewan McGregor and Eva Green, and the other dramatic about a pandemic spreading through the world and people gradually losing their sense of taste, hearing, and sight. It also contains many "what if" thoughts and shows us that with limitations, humans can still live. The philosophy from this film splashes everywhere and it's not a five-minute thing, where Eva Green or Ewan McGregor don't say something that would give you pause and make you think. A beautiful film, an interesting film... full of questions to which we don't know the answers, but which we will only learn when the time comes. Add to that the beautiful, hypnotic symphony on the piano by the brilliant composer Max Richter, and there's something absolutely amazing that everyone who likes to think about life should see. (17/02/2012)

The name David Mackenzie first caught my attention with the modern western Hell or High Water, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Perfect Sense, however, is a completely different kind of film. The closest comparison might be Soderbergh’s Contagion, but Perfect Sense is still quite distinct. It’s not a film with a particularly high budget, but on the other hand, it has a concept that hasn’t been explored before. A film about the gradual loss of human senses, one after the other? That’s something we really haven’t seen before, and it’s a good thing someone came up with it. I liked everything about the film, though I would have toned down the romantic subplot between Ewan McGregor and Eva Green, which felt a bit overdone and somewhat detracted from the overall effect. It’s not that it didn’t fit, but the creators seemed to give it more attention than the actual loss of human senses. I enjoyed how, during the loss of hearing, as a viewer, you really couldn’t hear anything—it struck me as a brilliant idea. The narrator's words stuck in my mind minute by minute. The ending was grand. It's a magnificent film made on a small budget, and it’s one that will make you think for days after watching it. I give it 83%. (11/06/2017)

Perfect Sense is a more philosophical version of Soderberg’s Contagion, but with more modest production. With the exception of the nicely done ending, however, it is just as cold and detached, which is not the best choice, given the film’s focus on the two central characters (and their relationship). (06/02/2012)

A perfect premise, no doubt. The director of Spread has made a surprisingly ambitious romantic drama with a global catastrophe as a backdrop. The result is quite impressive, but it could have been even more so if the relationship between the two protagonists worked better – I just didn’t feel any bond between McGregor and Green. The apocalyptic line works much better and it was the most enjoyable thing in Perfect Sense. What’s a stumbling block, though, is that the creators want to express way too many things in these two lines (from personal relationships, through the human nature, all the way to our relationship with our planet) and I couldn’t catch the central motif, if there was any to begin with. The resulting impression is as if someone had optimistically told me that I still have one year of a happy life left… 7/10 (15/01/2012)