Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) movie poster

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)

"Obsession can cause the unthinkable."
ThumbScore
👍 86%Google users liked it ⓘ
Critics Score
🎬 58%
CrimeFantasyDrama

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Where to Watch

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Director
Runtime
2h 27m
Rated
R
Country
Germany, France, Spain
Language
English
TMDB Rating
7.4/10 (4,921 votes)
Rotten Tomatoes
59%
Metacritic
56

Cast

Ben Whishaw as Jean-Baptiste Grenouille · 72% avg
Alan Rickman as Richis · 79% avg
Rachel Hurd-Wood as Laura · 76% avg
Dustin Hoffman as Giuseppe Baldini · 75% avg
John Hurt as Narrator (voice) · 74% avg
Karoline Herfurth as The Plum Girl · 76% avg
David Calder as Bishop of Grasse
Simon Chandler as Mayor of Grasse

Is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer good?

Yes. 86% of real audiences liked it, by Google's archived audience score. Critics scored it lower at 58%, but audiences disagreed.

Where it ranks on ThumbScore

Rank in its genre
#190 / 1253 · Crime
Rank in its year
#31 / 206 · 2006
Rank among its director's films
#1 / 5 · Tom Tykwer

By audience score, among films with 500 or more votes.

Overview

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in the stench of 18th century Paris, develops a superior olfactory sense, which he uses to create the world's finest perfumes. However, his work takes a dark turn as he tries to preserve scents in the search for the ultimate perfume. Wikipedia ↗

About the Film

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 — 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 — the one sense cinema cannot reproduce — 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.

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