Director David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Spread) has two very different love story films coming out in the next month, the festival-set You Instead and the pandemic-apocalyptic Perfect Sense.

A brilliant new trailer for the latter has now arrived, courtesy of Empire, and it gives us a lovely look at the budding romance between Ewan McGregor’s Michael, a chef, and Eva Green’s Susan, a scientist.

“The story of two people who begin to fall in love as the world begins to fall apart.

Susan is a scientist. Michael is a chef. He takes a break from the kitchen heat in the alleyway below her apartment; she smokes a cigarette at the window above. He calls up for a light – the first spark in their passionate affair.

But the world is about to change dramatically. As love turns Susan and Michael’s lives upside down, people across the globe begin to experience
strange symptoms, which first affect the emotions then the senses, one by one.

Everything changes. But people laugh, they cry, they eat and drink, they go about their daily business. They adapt, they change, they cope, they live and they love – because life must go on. And so it does.”

Parts of the synopsis admittedly read a little like Steven Soderbergh’s next film, Contagion, and some of the scenes in this new trailer even feel quite like it. But when you have two films that have a globally-spreading virus at their centre, at least some of the scenes are bound to look similar, and we shouldn’t hold that against either of them. Both are set to be excellent projects, and both should be very much worth watching.

Perfect Sense unites McGregor and Mackenzie after working together on Young Adam back in 2003, and McGregor is also united with fellow Trainspotting co-star Ewen Bremner, seen alongside him in the kitchen in the trailer.

This new look at the film makes it seem like a very interesting project, and I’m really looking forward to its 7th October release date. Contagion comes out two weeks later, on 21st October, so we should be in for two great pandemic-apocalyptic movies in one month this year. Both should be very different though, so I can’t wait for either. Jamie got to see the film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival earlier in the year, and his review of it was glowing with praise, and the trailer really shows that this is a film to get excited about. Without further ado, here it is. Enjoy.