Perfect Sense is a 2011 drama film, directed by David Mackenzie, starring Eva Green and Ewan McGregor. The storyline of the movie is about Michael, a talented chef; and Susan an epidemiologist who get to know each other and fall in love, typical like what you would expect from a romantic drama picture.
The film events take an unexpected turn as an epidemic begins to rob the world's population of their sensory perceptions. It explains the change in the human behavior upon the loss of each sense, and how individuals compensate losing one sense relying on the other senses.
The epidemic started as people are thrown into a state of profound grief, weeping uncontrollably, and when the grief passes, in less than 15 minutes, they discover that they have lost their sense of smell. Everyone starts to wear germ masks but nothing helps. Eventually, doctors declare that nothing seems to stop this illness and that no one is immune. People gradually learn how to compensate losing the sense of smell with excessive use of the sense of taste, they eat larger amounts of different diverse types of food in the same meal.
Not so long before the disease strikes again, people are overcome with ravenous hunger, eating every foodstuff in sight in gluttonous amounts, again for about 15 minutes. When they emerge from this eating delirium, they realize they have lost their sense of taste. Restaurant owners observe that although everyone has lost their taste of smell, they insist on going to restaurants and ordering fancy expensive food, craving into the different textures and temperatures, since they cannot taste it.
Before people even start to cope with losing two of their senses, the disease strikes one more time in a different way. It is a scene of an intriguing premise, which the Director builds to a moment of romantic tension, as Michael and Susan split up after a wave of the malady. They experience an uncontrollable, destructive rage that pitches the world into chaos. When they calm down after the rage fades, they realize that they have lost the sense of hearing.
Humanity now has only two senses left: sight and touch. People start to behave based only on their cultural and religious beliefs. Believers turned to God as they believed that this disease is God’s punishment for humanity for all the sins they have done. Non-believers just lost hope or even interest in fighting the disease. Others who were not sure of what they think or believe, just waited for what is certainly about to happen.
In the final scene, the Director framed the final strike of the disease. It came with a sudden wave of happiness, contentment and hope. The scene shows the unexplainable emotional rush that stroke Michael and Susan as they insanely run in the streets searching for each other, with a profound appreciation of what it means to be loved and be alive, and that is when the sense of sight disappears and the world goes dark. The disease no longer strikes anymore leaving them with only the sense of touch along with constant fears and endless doubts about how, or if there will be a way to go on.
