What a strange hypothetical it is to wonder which of your senses you could most easily part with. Certainly, no one who ever lost one would think to ask such a thing. Perfect Sense is sci-fi of just that apocolyptic kind, envisioning what might remain of our humanity when we are stripped, piecemeal, of all that makes us human.

In many such films, there goes a rarely unspoken assumption that were we to fail, all would be lost. Any delay in an about-turn of corporate excess would surely herald some ruinous brand of climate change, with its crashing waves and end-of-world prophecies. We’re led to believe that if Bruce Willis and Steven Tyler were unable to blast that damn asteroid from its orbit, life would simply have ceased to be. Disaster movies exist in a black and white world, for it serves their purposes well.

Despite its depicting a worldwide epidemic, Perfect Sense confines itself almost entirely to a single street in Glasgow, onto which Michael (Ewan McGregor), a chef, steps for his cigarette breaks. Susan (Eva Green) lives in the flat above. She works as an epidemiologist, whom other films might have put to use in a race to find a cure. Not here. What we have instead is human resilience in the face of inevitability. If Contagion was a story of how disaster was averted at the last, then Perfect Sense is what happened when it was not.

The disease has no name, either because no one is investigating it, or they’ve already done so and saw little point in continuing. What matters is that it affects everyone, everywhere, and slowly robs them of their senses. First comes smell, whose absence we reason has its upsides. Restaurants ably make up the difference by over seasoning their food. Then comes taste itself, for which there is no such relief. A food critic takes to describing his plates in terms of temperature and texture, which is rather akin to a movie critic being reduced to explaining the workings of the projector booth.

As go the senses, so too the mind. Routines are interrupted by slovenly carnal desires, in which formally civilised co-workers tear into flesh and vats of oil with equal abandon. Sometimes, they appear as if enveloped by a black cloud, their tears seemingly abundant and without end. When they necessarily revert to their former selves, there is a collective moment of realisation. Strangers gaze at one another, at their stained clothes and sodden faces, suddenly appalled at what has become.

Michael and Susan huddle together, their romance trapped amidst a fracturing sea. They continue to meet, even as debris litters the street and quarantine orders go up. Their relationship is frequently seen to bow and bend, as if breaking, only to blossom once more. They are not billed names, isolated from the prevailing winds – their fate is that of everyone else. There are no approaching tidal waves, or imminent invasions; no cataclysmic event to make or ruin. The future of Perfect Sense is one in which we simply continue, ever-more disabled, redefining humanity as we must.

From Captain America to a personal injury lawyer with a voracious coke habit. Chris Evans plots a strange course, and he will no doubt have been warned that a film like Puncture makes neither money nor sense. Both are undoubtedly true. That he did it anyway is the mark of a man who might yet confound the trajectory of his earlier Human Torch.

A 1999 study revealed that 800,000 so-called needlestick injuries occurred every year in the United States alone. Overwhelmingly affecting nurses and other front-line health workers, such injuries were not only life threatening, but shockingly preventable. The hospitals knew it, the insurance companies knew it, and Jeffrey Dancort could prove it. He had invented a safety needle that was impossible to reuse, accidently or otherwise. Even so, Dancort was not a greedy man: he demanded neither financial reward nor a long career protecting his patents. All he wanted was to see his needle in every hospital in America.

Every hospital in America said no.

The reasons why amount to money, as they often do. Just a handful of purchasing groups managed two-thirds of the industry’s supply contracts, representing agreements worth some 35 billion dollars. Dancort alleged they had colluded to prevent him from even getting as far as demonstrating his product, let alone lobbying doctors and nurses for its uptake. Puncture documents just one woman whose life could have been dramatically altered had those companies behaved otherwise, yet it could have picked from 799,999 more.

This is a movie to be angry about. I’m not sure it is necessarily a great movie, but it’s certainly a clearer, more furious one than The Lincoln Lawyer. Where that relied on style and charisma to make up for its many deficiencies, Puncture is purposefully ugly. Mike Weiss (Chris Evans) is a hungry young lawyer just barely getting by. His talents are beyond doubt, but these can be no day in court to prove his brilliance when sitting opposite are a dozen highly paid attorneys, flanked on either side by a dozen more. That’s just how justice works.

Even if it wasn’t, Weiss is rarely in a fit state to help it along. He lives in what amounts to a drug-den, aimlessly indulging his nightly habits of drugs and prostitutes. He misses important meetings, and those he does attend are necessarily bookended by visits to the bathroom. When he and his partner meet with the sole senator willing to lobby their case, she discovers him bleeding and incoherent. Weiss cares profoundly, and still he self-destructs.

The film’s failing is in being too enamoured by the cult of personality. That’s understandable given Evans’ muscular and, ironically, rather subtle portrayal: he doesn’t hooah his way through the scenery, because Weiss is enough of a force without magnifying him further. But the issues at stake – and our outrage towards them – should be central, and they are not. There are ways to make that other kind of movie – Michael Mann did as as much with ‘The Insider’ – and yet Steven Zaillian’s ‘A Civil Action’ offers the most relevant example of how an incendiary personality can be made to supplement the larger, more impactful legal dramas contained therein.

Puncture remains a good movie, if not quite the one the story deserves. Evans is a revelation, and Brett Cullen is fittingly odious for the defence. These things are worthy of your time, and they will leave you with a renewed sense of injustice. That’s good for the soul.