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Just Another Manic Doomsday

After seeing countless "serious" films about the world's coming demise - two, "Melancholia" and "Contagion," just last year - I'm this close to bailing on the genre. The films are always so intense, humorless and meandering, yearning to make profound statements that instead get buried beneath metaphors and pretense. Please, send in the goofy zombies of "Shaun of the Dead" to help lighten the mood.

The newest film about the planet's plunge is "Perfect Sense," which tries to parallel the sensations of falling in love with a viral apocalypse, and fails miserably. Here's why: The main characters, Michael (Ewan McGregor) and Susan (Eva Green), are dreadful bores. Within the first five minutes, he asks her to leave after they have sex because he "can't sleep with another person in the bed", and she decides to throw stones at seagulls to pass the time. Are these really two people you want to spend time with before the human race gets depleted? Didn't think so.

So he's kind of a dick, but he's cute and a chef, so he gets a pass. And she's kind of a mess, but she's pretty and an epidemiologist so that's all right. Speaking of that, she is studying a new disease that contains a laundry list of arbitrary symptoms: first, you are slammed with immense grief, and then you lose your sense of smell (Severe Olfactory Syndrome - or, gag, "S.O.S."). Then you panic and get a ravenous appetite, leading you to chow down on literally anything in your path, and boom, there goes your taste. Of course later you'll go deaf after having an angry fit and screaming horrible things at people you care about, the more offensive the better. All this apparently signifies the end of life.

If this premise isn't absurd enough, there is an earnest narrator that states the obvious about whatever is going on, accompanied by violins playing and shots of society settling into its new reality. "People prepare for the worst but hope for the best" she says, somehow without laughing. "Trainspotting" narration this isn't, and director David Mackenzie ("Young Adam") lays it all on excessively thick. Likewise, the script by Danish writer Kim Fupz Aakeson is way out of touch. The sole line of dialogue that stands out is when Michael and Susan refer to themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Asshole, because that's about the only true observation in the movie.

"Perfect Sense," with all its heavy-handed comments and pseudo-artsy camera angles, slogs along at a patience-trying clip despite its mere 92-minute runtime. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel bored.