Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) is Tom Tykwer's dark drama, available to watch online on iFILM. It adapts Patrick Süskind's celebrated novel for the screen.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born among the reeking fish stalls of 18th-century Paris and orphaned almost at once. He carries no scent of his own, yet his nose is extraordinary, capable of sorting thousands of smells and forgetting none. Apprenticed to a faded perfumer named Baldini, the young man becomes fixated on one impossible goal: capturing and preserving the scent of human skin. That obsession drives him to kill. Ben Whishaw plays Grenouille, alongside Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman and John Hurt.

Tykwer took on a book long branded unfilmable, since how do you put smell on screen? His answer was the camera itself: tight shots of petals, skin and steam, paired with an uneasy score he composed with the Berlin Philharmonic. John Hurt narrates. Stream Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) online on iFILM.