Perfect Sense

While Hollywood bores us with sundry CGI-heavy visions of the apocalypse, the very intimacy of this modest Glasgow-set production provides a far more affecting account of the sum of all fears. On one side of a courtyard, there’s the staff entrance of chef Ewan McGregor’s restaurant, on the other the flat belonging to epidemiologist Eva Green. He’s a commitment-phobic womaniser, she’s a damaged, aloof loner – so of course, they get it together... just as the world is surrendering helplessly to a mystery virus progressively depriving us of our sensory perceptions. The best film to date from director David Mackenzie (‘Hallam Foe’, ‘Young Adam’) is astutely pitched as a playful, even poetic riposte to familiar celluloid intimations of mortality, yet it’s also a serious and powerful musing on what makes us human. Yes, the love story is obvious, but the performers carry it off, while the prime frissons emerge from writer Kim Fupz Aakeson’s resonant imagining of where we’d be  without smell, hearing, sight... Thrillingly ambitious, ecstatically romantic, utterly unexpected.