Yeah, I can hear your protests and I understand your amazement. Watching a film about a global pandemic that is causing unrest and disorder around the world and is endangering the social order and perhaps even the existence of the human species? In addition, the first symptoms of the disease include loss of sense of smell and then loss of taste? Is that what we need? Well, yes, that’s how ‘Perfect Sense‘ could be described. The film was made in 2011, almost a decade before we all learned the word COVID, by English director David Mackenzie. That would be, however, a very rough description of what is happening on the screen. Premonitions aside, we are dealing with a combination of a love story and an apocalyptic movie that works unexpectedly well in many moments. The apocalypse takes forms that seemed to be in the realm of imagination until two years ago, the resemblance of what is happening on screen to events that would take place on our planet ten years later is undeniably coincidental, but I think we can draw parallels and draw some lessons concerning the realities around us. In other words, ‘Perfect Sense‘ is a film of anticipation made in the past and actual for the present.
Susan (Eva Green) has a job that is very fashionable today – she’s an epidemiologist. Michael (Ewan McGregor) has a job that is very fashionable in movies – he’s a chef. Although they live and work close to each other, in London in the near future of 2011, the two meet just as the world begins to end. A strange pandemic is attacking humanity. It is not known exactly how it spreads and no one escapes in the end. People suffer successive attacks of depression, hunger, violence and … love, followed by the complete loss of a sense one after the other. Can love emerge and survive in these circumstances?
I don’t know if Danish screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson and director David Mackenzie dreamed when they made this film how actual it would look a decade after its making. They were inspired not to insist on the scientific aspects, and the mechanisms of the disease are not discussed, nor is the expert in epidemiology a super-hero. The successive loss of the senses creates a personal resonance for the spectators, thus a horror effect. The authors found it more important to show the consequences of the disease. Masks, forced quarantine scenes and reactions of mass hysteria seem at times extracted from the last night news. Every loss of a sense is preceded by a psychological reaction – a metaphor for the fact that the root of disease may be primarily in ourselves. The couple of actors is excellently chosen and manages, in my opinion, to convey the feeling of anxiety in face of the unknown, of revolt in face of the inevitable that many of us have experienced in recent years. The ending can be considered tragic, or perhaps, paradoxically, it contains a dose of optimism and confidence in the power of love. ‘Perfect Sense‘ probably wouldn’t have had the same impact if the COVID pandemic hadn’t happened, but I consider it one of the best movies to predict it. We had been warned.