Lack of skin in Netflix’s German criminal
Netflix’s new drama thriller “The Perfumer” is terribly slow and lacks the exciting elements it promises. But it’s still a nice film, which with the right expectations you might like a lot.
Today is the premiere of Netflix’s German crime drama “The Perfumer”which, despite a promising setup on paper, fails in what it primarily purports to do: give viewers an exciting murder mystery.
The plot of the film picks up when the police detective Sunny moves to a small coastal town in the country with her boyfriend to start a new job in the force. Suddenly, a series of victims begin to appear around the area, all missing hair and their sweat glands. We understand that there is a serial killer and perfume maker on the loose who uses his victims to make a unique perfume that smells of love. But when Sunny crosses paths with the serial killer, a cat-and-mouse game begins that one might have first imagined. Instead, she wants his help in getting her long-broken sense of smell fixed, perhaps most of all to smell the scent of her boyfriend with whom she is deeply in love.
An intermittently murderous slow roll
We all like a story with a twistand there is no doubt that this story – which is based on Patrick Suskinds famous novel Der Perfumes – has an interesting premise. And I like the dreamy sequences that are created around the perfumes of the film, they are beautifully created. But it goes without saying that The perfumer is a periodically murderous slow roller, this despite its short running time of just over ninety-five minutes.
Rather than being a dense police thriller, this is more of a story about Sunny wanting to regain her sense of smell. We also spend a lot of time with her thoughts, and there it rarely gets very exciting. What happened to “show, don’t tell?”. You can also forget about seeing some chilling and unpleasant murder sequences as the perfumer goes after his victims. No, there aren’t enough drives or nasty scenes to demand our attention. We get a certain escalation towards the end when Sunny is forced to deal with the evil forces that loom in the small town. But you who settle down on the sofa with the expectation of seeing a beautifully filmed drama with appealing fantasy elements will not be as disappointed as the undersigned. After all, it’s basically a good-looking movie.
“The Perfumer” is now available to stream on Netflix.
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