7. Perfume: Story Of A Murderer
What We Got: An Artsy Crime Thriller? A Period Murder Melodrama? An Attempt At Smell-O-Vision? Repugnance In Movie-Form??
What It Should've Been: A
Dark Humor Tale, Satirizing Psychotic Murderer Films Wow, just wow where to begin? I guess I "admire" the filmmaker's for crafting one of the most unpleasant movie experiences I've ever had. This project is so misguided that no one thing about could change this to 'good' territory, but a change in the oppressively dark tone would be a start. Overlong, overwrought and thoroughly unpleasant. 'Run Lola Run's Tom Twyker helms a thoroughly misguided attempt at a murder thriller, while also attempting smell-o-vision. I'm not kidding, the camera zooms in on certain objects (mostly garbage, corpses, bad fish... the stuff you would want to experience smelling) and people to try and 'will' the audience into smelling what the murderer (Ben Whisaw) is smelling. It's all an effort to try and 'explain' his motivations. So as you can probably tell, the whole thing is an absolute mess, both on page and screen. The main problem is that the actors, with the exception of Dustin Hoffman, are not in on this gimmicky and jokey premise. Giving flat and uninteresting performances. Which leads me to think that Twyker wasn't in on the joke either, he really wanted us to take this crap seriously. The only real way for this story to work would be by doing a Coen-Brothers-esque dark humor period piece critiquing the 'Psycho Killer' genre of movies. The premise already sounds like it was a Coen-Bro's script, the rest of the movie; however, just had none of their wit or exceptional filmmaking techniques.