Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)
Where to Watch
- During the filming of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Ben Whishaw improvised one of the most famous lines in the movie.
- Eagle-eyed viewers have noticed a hidden easter egg referencing Tom Tykwer's previous film in the background of the opening scene.
- Tom Tykwer originally wanted a completely different ending for the film, but test audiences preferred the one we see today.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a 2006 German-French-Spanish period thriller directed by Tom Tykwer, based on Patrick Suskind's 1985 bestselling novel. Ben Whishaw stars as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan in 18th-century Paris born with the most extraordinary sense of smell in human history but who himself has no personal body odor. Obsessed with capturing and preserving the perfect scent, Grenouille apprentices to a declining perfumer played by Dustin Hoffman and eventually discovers that the essence of beautiful young women produces the most intoxicating fragrance โ leading him to murder a series of virgin girls in the French town of Grasse to distill their scent into the ultimate perfume.
Tom Tykwer faced the seemingly impossible challenge of making a film about the sense of smell โ the one sense cinema cannot reproduce โ and solved it through sumptuous visual imagery, narration by John Hurt, and the extraordinary final sequence, in which Grenouille's perfume affects a crowd in ways too bizarre and transgressive for most audiences to anticipate. Perfume earned $135 million worldwide on a $65 million budget.





