GRAB them by the eyeballs, King Frederick of Prussia used to say, or German words to that effect. Perfume attempts to grab an audience by the nostrils. Patrick Suskind's bestselling 1985 novel was thought by many to be un-filmable. It was claimed that cinema . . . being a visual medium . . .

would be unable to evoke the sense of smell that turns its 18th-century protagonist into a serial killer, a man obsessed with creating an ultimate scent from the distilled essences of his female victims. There was even talk of reviving the failed 1960s experiment Odarama, which involved pumping appropriate aromas into the auditorium during screenings. The assumption seemed to be that everything in movies is literally true, whereas in fact movies are imagined realities: nothing they show is real. They're all about suspending disbelief.

Tom Tykwer, best known up to now for the hyper fast Run Lola Run, appreciates this and, working from an ingenious screenplay by Andrew Birkin, has no difficulty at all in creating an illusion of smell.

Right from the first close-up of Ben Wishaw's twitching nosed, the screen positively reeks not just of exquisite fragrances but of the foulest stink of city squalor that typified that era.

A more complex challenge was to find a way of making credible an illiterate protagonist who was incapable of expressing himself except in a laboratory. The trick is to use a narrator . . . John Hurt . . . to enable us to understand the monster's motives, if not empathise with him.

Born in the stench of the Paris fish market on the hottest day of the year and dumped in bloody entrails under the gutting table of her stall, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille understandably gives out a horrible scream . . . which leads to his mother being taken away and hanged for attempted murder.

Growing up in an orphanage, he early on displays a phenomenal sense of smell which causes him to be regarded as a freak. Sold for tenn francs to a tannery, he works until manhood amid the stink of nitrates and rotting hides. While running errands for his master in the city he catches the whiff of a beautiful flower girl and follows her, accidentally causing her death when she attempts to scream. To his distress the aroma which attracted him to her fades as life ebbs from her body. Chance then brings him under the tutelage of a master perfumer (Dustin Hoffman) who recognises his remarkable gift. He becomes something of a celebrity but is still haunted by the girl's memory, and heads south to the purple lavender fields of Grasse in Provence where he embarks on his murderous quest for olfactory perfection.

Perfume develops into a period thriller . . . somewhat in the manner of The Name Of The Rose . . . in which the tension lies in his intuitive ability to elude the capture that we know to be inevitable from an opening sequence that showed him being dragged through the streets in shackles.

The set-pieces are audacious, notably the computer-generated collapse of an entire bridge and with it the shop of the perfumer, and a climactic public orgy in which an entire square is crammed with naked couples having sex, crazed not by drugs but by his final perfume. Despite its morbid subject matter, Perfume is a tour-de-force that demands to be seen, a dark fable that defies humdrum reality.