Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

This is a dark, dark, dark film, focused on an obsession so complete and lonely it shuts out all other human experience. You may not savor it, but you will not stop watching it, in horror and fascination.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Most horror movies try to show us the man inside the monster, so we'll empathize with his moral dilemmas or feel his suffering. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer shows us a man who is all monster, whose colossal amorality makes him a potential Messiah or menace to humanity.

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

Whishaw's oddly charismatic performance makes the despicable Grenouille into an almost sympathetic antihero. The rather astonishing finale will likely have audiences either howling in derision or ardently dissecting afterward. And it must have given the bluenoses at the MPAA fits.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The film is downright repulsive in places, and otherwise pushes the envelope for an art film, but it's a dazzling piece of filmmaking that wins us over with its boldness and artistry.

Empire Dan Jolin

The odd conclusion renders it somewhat oblique, but Perfume is a feast for the senses.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

Tykwer makes of all this murder and madness a concoction of improbable beauty and rare artistry. "Perfume" is not just the finest film of his career but easily one of the past year's most accomplished.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It is to director Tykwer's credit that, although you never come close to understanding Jean-Baptiste, you don't turn your nose up at him, either.

Premiere Ethan Alter

Perfume is sure to annoy as many moviegoers as it entertains, but at least even the naysayers would find it difficult to argue that film is nothing if not a departure from the ordinary.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

This is a crazy, gorgeous, disturbing, darkly comic horror story about an early-18th-century Frenchman born in a Paris fish market without any odor of his own but with a sense of smell that would make a pack of bloodhounds wail with envy.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, crosses over from thriller into magic realism for a lavishly staged climax that's a bit much.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Perfume misses some of the subtler base notes of Süskind's creepier, more self-aware original, but Whishaw and Tykwer blend the movie into something quite heady in its own bottle.

The Hollywood Reporter Bernard Besserglik

Long regarded as unfilmable, Patrick Suskind's 1985 novel "Perfume" has finally reached the screen in a blockbuster production that succeeds reasonably well in achieving what many said was beyond the scope of cinema: conveying the world of scent and smell.

Variety Derek Elley

The seductive, sensory prose of Patrick Suskind's bestseller, "Perfume," reaches the screen with loads of visual panache but only intermittent magic.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

A memorable and outrageous movie, but one more likely to be remembered as a massive folly than a whopping success.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Deeply flawed though it may be, Perfume is a challenging motion picture, and one whose impressions are not easily shaken.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The film, though admirably ambitious, is resolutely earthbound, mired in ick and slime and never more wooden than in the delirious climax.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Perfume is a pitch-black period epic of squalor and enterprise.

Village Voice Ed Halter

It's a noble experiment in pushing the limits of cinema, but Tykwer never achieves true profundity.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Perfume is ultimately an unmistakable failure, but there's a strange majesty to its epic overreaching. It can be faulted for many things, but not for lacking the courage of its convictions.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Weaves a sensual spell of extraordinary delicacy, then sustains it -- up to a point.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and cowriters Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger preserve some of the novel's storytelling flair, and Dustin Hoffman does a swell turn as the antihero's Italian mentor. But despite a fairly spectacular climax, the material's generic limitations eventually catch up with the plot.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

By the time Perfume arrives at its ridiculous mass orgy, staged at the gallows where Grenouille is supposed to meet his end, you really would rather see him meet his end than endure a ridiculous mass orgy.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

It's simultaneously arty, arcane and nasty.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jennie Punter

While Tom Tykwer's lavish and lively screen adaptation of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is certainly not a stinker, there is something decidedly off about it.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

There are sniff movies and there are snuff movies, but Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is both. It has the bouquet of balm and blood. Imagine "Fragrance of the Lambs."

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Tykwer's camera can assault the audience with the rankest of imagery, but not even once does it come close to distilling the actual aroma of the abattoir that was 18th-century France. And for that, I suppose, we should all be thankful.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

What's missing is less a sense of the protagonist's inner nose (which is very well-trammeled) as a sense of his inner life, motivation or desire.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Try as it might to be refined and provocative, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer never rises above the pedestrian creepiness of its conceit.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

This isn't pleasant to watch. Neither is it amusing, intellectually engaging, whimsically fascinating, coldly satirical or painfully poignant, though at any given moment in this erratic film director Tom Tykwer might be trying for one of these conflicting tones.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Perfume offers eau de crud.