# Perfume (2018)

> A German crime thriller in which detectives investigate a singer's murder, with her scent glands removed, by probing the friends she knew from boarding school.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/71644

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 6
- Episode runtime: 57 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: crime, mystery, thriller
- Created by: Eva Kranenburg, Oliver Berben, Philipp Kadelbach
- Network: ZDFneo
- Cast: Friederike Becht, Wotan Wilke Möhring, Juergen Maurer, Ken Duken, Natalia Belitski, August Diehl, Trystan Pütter, Christian Friedel
- TMDB rating: 7.0/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6811236/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: moderate
- Tone: bleak, tense, brooding, unsettling, cold

## What critics say

Mixed reception, with audiences giving it a middling rating for its dark murder mystery and its ambitious adaptation of the novel's premise.

## Synopsis

Perfume (2018) is a German crime thriller limited series created by Eva Kranenburg, Oliver Berben and Philipp Kadelbach for ZDFneo. When a singer is found murdered with her scent glands excised from her body, profiler Nadja Simon (Friederike Becht) and prosecutor Grünberg (Wotan Wilke Möhring) work alongside detective Matthias Köhler (Juergen Maurer) to probe a close circle of friends who once attended boarding school with the victim. The engine of the series is a steady unravelling of old loyalties and concealed guilt, with each episode peeling back another layer of the group's shared history and the private obsessions that bound them. Across a single six-episode season of roughly fifty-seven minutes each, the story stays tightly focused on the investigation, moving between the present-day inquiry and the past it keeps uncovering. The mood is cold, bleak and psychologically tense, with a fixation on scent giving the crime an unsettling sensory core. Set in contemporary Germany, the series will appeal to viewers who enjoy dark European crime television in the vein of Dark, The Killing and Broadchurch, and its mix of procedural detail and buried secrets rewards patient, attentive watching.

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- [Babylon Berlin (2017)](https://ember.film/tv/58972)
- [Woman of the Dead (2022)](https://ember.film/tv/134936)
- [Criminal: Germany (2019)](https://ember.film/tv/79405)
- [In the Face of Crime (2010)](https://ember.film/tv/34152)

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