Starring Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffmann, and Alan Rickman. Rated 18A.

From a delivery of red rose petals cascading into a dingy cellar basement to a birth scene amid the entrails and blood of a fish market, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer achieves what only John Waters has managed to pull off: conveying the sense of smell on-screen.

Hip German director Tom Tykwer takes an abrupt turn away from jacked-up style fests like Run Lola Run and Deadly Maria to bring this strange, dark period piece–meets–murder mystery to the screen. He faithfully and artfully adapts Patrick Süskind’s bestselling 1985 novel of the same name (reputed to have been Kurt Cobain’s favourite book), but the film might be a little too, well, pungent for the mainstream masses. (Will multiplex regulars want to see a fishmonger severing her newborn’s umbilical cord with her knife?)

Whether or not you like Perfume, however, you have to appreciate the way Tykwer offers up a unique blend of beauty and grotesquery, gritty historical realism and leaps of metaphysicality. His lead character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is captivatingly bizarre thanks to the work of newcomer Ben Whishaw, who must be ominous and threatening yet maintain an innocent, boyish naiveté. Born into the 18th-century Parisian squalor of orphanages and indentured work at brutal tanneries, Grenouille has a gift that seems wasted: he has a sense of smell so refined that he can differentiate the layers of wet grass and stones that stretch for miles outside his dingy lodgings. But when aging perfumier Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman) discovers his talents, he starts to teach Grenouille the traditional arts of capturing scents and creating fragrances, and the younger man soon heads to the south of France to learn more about enfleurage. Those studies also lead Grenouille on an obsessive drive to somehow trap and eternalize the human scent. He sets off on a murderous rampage that triggers in the public a Jack the Ripper–like hysteria wherever he goes, and attracts the ire of a revenge-minded father, Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman).

Tykwer conjures the period settings so successfully that you can—yes—almost smell them. He plays the mud-slicked streets and grotty food markets of the stinkiest era in history off the lavish world of gilded perfume vials and potpourri jars. The immense research of Süskind’s tome is fluidly integrated, whether it’s Baldini telling Grenouille about the ancient Egyptians’ penchant for fragrances or in the detailed re-creation of the giant glass tanks full of blossoms used for enfleurage. That faithfulness to the text results in a number of consequences on the screen: scenes of Grenouille treating the bodies of his victims take on a much more macabre edge, the film lags through the midpoint as he learns his new profession, and the over-the-top magic-realist denouement looks a bit ridiculous.

Still, Perfume is worth sniffing out if you’re craving something other than the usual post-holiday fare. Despite its flaws, its haunting, oddball charms, like its potions, work an undeniable spell­—if you can handle a few off-putting odours.