Wednesday, November 23, 2022

The Perfumier (2022)

IMDb plot summary: A police detective tries to get back his girlfriend as well as his sense of smell, as he gets help from a perfume maker who uses deadly methods to find the perfect perfume.
Directed by Nils Willbrandt. Starring Sólveig Arnarsdóttir, August Diehl, and Robert Finster.

The Perfumier is a 2022 German crime drama very, very loosely based on the book "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" by Patrick Suskind. There's already a film of the same name that follows the book more closely, but this feels more like a fan fiction story inspired by the original. Both stories include a gifted perfume maker who becomes obsessed with creating the perfect love potion, even if it means killing young women and extracting their scent from them to do it. This one focuses on a police officer with no sense of smell who finds herself on the killer's track. So I love the movie and just recently read and loved the book, so there's a part of me that disliked how very different this one was, but if I think of it as just a regular crime movie, the central conceit does add a slightly more interesting extra layer to what would otherwise be a bland story. It takes a lot of the sort of melodramatically fantastical elements of the book and makes it fit in surprisingly well to a more stereotypical lurid crime thriller. Would I recommend it? Well, not really, not when the originals are right there, but if you're a big fan of the new genre, you might have fun with it.

How it entered my Flickchart:
The Perfumier < Vampyr
The Perfumier > The Little Princess (1939)
The Perfumier < Satantango
The Perfumier > Patriots Day
The Perfumier < Birdman of Alcatraz
The Perfumier > Genius
The Perfumier > The Dirty Dozen
The Perfumier > Lolita (1997)
The Perfumier < Pal Joey
The Perfumier < Innocence Unprotected
The Perfumier < High Society
The Perfumier > August: Osage County
Final spot: #2461 out of 3731, or 34%.

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