Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born in a Parisian fish market, with nothing to his name except for a super-humanly keen sense of smell. After inadvertently killing a beautiful young girl, he becomes obsessed with finding a way to preserve scents – this obsession and his peculiar talent lead him into apprenticeship with a master perfumer (Dustin Hoffman), and then to the town of Grasse, where he begins a murderous quest to capture the ultimate perfume.

Making a film about scent provides an unusual and, you’d think, a nigh-on impossible challenge – after all, no-one except Roger Corman has ever seriously experimented with Smell-O-Vision. Tykwer and his long-term cinematographer Frank Griebe get around the problem in perhaps the only possible way, by playing up to the sense that cinema represents best. Perfume is astonishingly beautiful to look at, full of striking imagery and vibrant colour. But more than that, it’s amazingly physical, almost textured; where most films are filled with perfectly-complexioned actors in bland locations, Perfume revels in complexity. Grenouille’s skin is a landscape in itself it’s so scarred and blemished; the perfumers shops are masterpieces of detail. And because Grenouille doesn’t differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ smells, neither does the camera distinguish according to usual ideas of beauty or ugliness – Griebe lingers with the same loving attention over a rock, a woman’s hair, the body of a dead rat.

There’s no doubt that Perfume is beautifully shot, and Tykwer’s direction is never less than interesting, as you’d expect from the man behind Run, Lola Run; likewise the acting is mostly good, particularly from a restrained Alan Rickman and from Ben Whishaw, who’s suitably odd in a difficult lead role. But there are problems, and many of those are exactly the ones you’d expect from an adaptation of a complex novel: the pacing is episodic, the development of minor characters is distinctly patchy, and the plot relies on narration to keep the already overlong running time to a manageable length.

All of these, however, are minor flaws; what’s more likely to ruin the film for some people, and harder to pin down, is Perfume‘s tone. Put it this way – by the end, my face was aching from trying not to laugh and my brain hurt from trying to work out whether or not I was supposed to be laughing when nobody else was. There are some deeply surreal moments, and there’s a definite current of (very black) humour, but in places it’s hard to tell what’s deliberately funny and what’s supposed to be taken seriously and has simply backfired – especially towards the increasingly-bizarre ending. Perfume also tries to deal with some pretty complex and unusual ideas that need the room and perspective of a novel to fully flesh them out and end up as muddled abstracts within the tighter constraints of a film script.

Like its hero, Perfume succeeds best as being an intriguing oddity. It’s frequently beautiful, routinely bizarre, and confuses at least as much as it enlightens. To be fair, adapting Patrick Süskind’s novel was never going to be easy going – apparently the late, great Stanley Kubrick considered it before deciding that the book was unfilmable. But that aside, it seems a safe bet that the kinds of people that go to see historical dramas set in eighteenth century France aren’t necessarily the same people that go to see movies about serial killers. As such Perfume is a brave film, and a fascinating one, but its eccentricities aren’t going to endear it to everyone.