Scents & serial killers take center stage in trailer for Netflix’s Perfume

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Unless you're talking Smell-O-Vision, it's more than a little difficult to translate the sense of smell to movies and television, but the best example I can think of is PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER, an adaptation of the Patrick Suskind novel which happens to be one of my favourite movies of all-time. The film follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw), an unusual man born in eighteenth-century France with a superhuman sense of smell who aims to create the world's finest perfume, and he'll only need to commit a few murders in order to make it. Seriously, if you've never watched this beautiful and bizarre film, please do check it out.

I had no idea that a TV series based upon the novel had been in the works, so I was more than a little surprised when Netflix recently released a trailer for Perfume, a six-part German series which will give the story a contemporary spin. "While in boarding school, a group of six become friends through their intense passion for scent. When one is brutally murdered years later, disturbing secrets about the group are revealed when the police investigates each as a suspect." While the trailer doesn't exactly blow me away, it is exciting to know that a new twist on one of my favourite stories is on the way.

A synopsis of "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" via Amazon:

In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille’s genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the “ultimate perfume”—the scent of a beautiful young virgin.

Perfume will debut on Netflix on December 21, 2018.