PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER

In the slums of 18th century Paris, a baby is born to an impoverished fishmonger who abandons her child in the stinking, rotten detritus of a street market. Passed over to monks as a charity case, they can find no one to care for the child - for Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is no ordinary child. Grenouille has the extraordinary ability to decipher the complex swirl of smells around him but soon realizes, to his horror, that he has no smell of his own. He apprentices himself to a perfumer and quickly masters the art. One day he smells the essence of something so exquisite that he is determined to capture it: a beautiful young virgin on the brink of womanhood. With an artist's desire to create perfection - yet without those "ordinary" feelings of moral responsibility - we follow Jean-Baptiste along his murderous quest to create the ultimate perfume for his own adornment: leading to a rising storm of terror across the French countryside. Patrick Suskind's classic fable of criminal genius that has for two decades been the acclaimed literary best-seller and international sensation, finally comes to the screen in a hauntingly powerful and terrifying examination of unnatural passion and sensual depravity that promises to captivate audiences worldwide.