Trama

A police detective tries to get back her boyfriend as well as her sense of smell, as she gets help from a perfume maker who uses deadly methods to find the perfect fragrance.

Sunny Valentin (Emilia Schule), a police officer, transferred to a new town, hoping to stay closer to her lover, Juro (Robert Finster). Juro was married with two children. Sunny knew about his family, but she could not help but fall in love with him. It was not just her troubled relationship that bothered her but also the fact that she had a unique disadvantage; she could not smell. She always felt that she was missing out on a range of experiences. On the contrary, there was a killer on the loose who was murdering young women, shaving their heads, and removing their sweat glands. It was soon deduced that the motive behind the murders was to extract the pheromones from the bodies.

After following Dorian's (Ludwig Simon) accomplice, Rex (Anne Muller), for several days, the police were confident that the two murdered their victims in a bunker in the woods. Sunny was devastated when Juro broke up with her. She dedicated all her time to finding the murderer. After following Rex closely for some time, she decided to follow her one morning and reached a house. She called for backup, and Juro arrived on the scene. Before entering, they overheard a heated discussion. Juro and Sunny entered the apartment and got hold of Rex, but Dorian disappeared. Sunny found a bottle of perfume that Dorian had created using the scent of all the women he had murdered. She could not smell it, but the moment she rubbed it on her wrist, Juro could not resist getting physically intimate with her. Sunny decided to keep the perfume with her, and it was a secret she hoped to never give away.

Meanwhile, the argument between Dorian and Rex indicated that he was unsatisfied with the perfume he had created. He wanted to create the perfume of love, but he had created a perfume that turned humans wild to fulfill their intimate fantasies. Rex was in police custody and the case was closed. Sunny uses the perfume to restart her relationship with Juro.

After getting pregnant, Sunny was dreadful about the fact that she would not bond well with her child as she could not smell it. She decided to seek help, and she believed that the only person who would be able to help her was Dorian. With his knowledge of aromatics, he could help guide Sunny to rediscover her lost sense. Sunny found him in the bunker. He looked impoverished and hopeless. But in Sunny's presence, he rediscovered hope. He advised her to bring him materials that would help him create specific scents. It was while buying his list of goods that she found an odorless, toxic fluid and kept it close to her, knowing how dangerous the man she was dealing with was. Dorian introduced her to the six basic scents and asked her to smell them regularly twice a day. But no matter how hard Sunny tried, she could not reawaken her senses. Dorian believed she had to return to the past, which took away her sense of smell. Sunny lost it when she caught a cold as a little girl, and her parents neglected her health. Her father had abandoned them, and her mother could not take care of her.

Dorian wanted her to revisit her childhood, and only then could she regain the sense of smell that she had developed as a child. Sunny realized that it was a useless pursuit and wanted to end her deal with Dorian. He knew that if the deal ended, he could be brought to prison, so he chose to hit her with an object and push her off a wall into the woods. He was thankful to Sunny for inspiring him to create the perfume of love.

Sunny's sense of smell was reinstated after the fall. Somehow, the physical injury helped her get back what she had lost. Her joy had no boundaries; she was just like a little girl who had the entire world to discover. Out of curiosity, she smelled the perfume of lust. Sunny had no control over her mind or her body. She was in a land of pleasure, and she thoroughly enjoyed it.

After escaping from Sunny, Dorian freed Rex from a forensic psychiatric unit. He did so with the help of a concoction he created that could induce terror in those who inhaled it. The guard collapsed as a result of a panic attack, and Rex walked out of the facility. Rex wanted back the lust perfume, and Dorian agreed to give it to them after cooking the perfume of love. The perfume of love would be delicate, just like the smell of a newborn baby. Dorian could not resist the smell of the baby. He could smell it from Sunny's body. He could even predict the unborn baby's age through smell.

Meanwhile, Sunny was living the best days of her life with Juro. After learning about her pregnancy, they bought a house in the country together. They lived happily there, though Sunny never stopped using the perfume. She could not resist the satisfying result. The intoxication from the perfume affected their health. Sunny's hands were itchy, whereas Juro's nose bled. Sunny wanted to understand Dorian.

She knew he had a troubled childhood, so she decided to talk to his father. Dorian's father was a pastor. He stated that his son was born with an unbearable stench. His stench kept people away from him. The moment Dorian realized that his body odor was the reason people stayed away from him, he tried to scrub it off. From then on, he wanted to create a human scent. He teamed up with his senior from school, Rex, and the two experimented. They tried to create the scent using a chimpanzee sent to the church. After discovering what his son was up to, he was confident that the devil had possessed Dorian. But no matter what he did, his son never stopped being strange. Dorian went back to the place where he and Rex used to experiment. He wanted to reconnect with his childhood memories. He was trying to gather the elements for the love perfume, but he was not sure of the entire formula. He named the last element of his perfume Pearl, and Rex murdered another young woman to extract pheromones.

Sunny burned down Dorian's temple (childhood experimentation spot), and it angered him. He knew how desperate Rex was for the lust perfume, so to seek revenge, he revealed that Sunny had the perfume. When Sunny entered her house, she dropped to the floor. Rex had sprayed the room with anesthetics and tied Sunny to a chair. Instead of handing over the perfume, Sunny dropped it on the floor. Rex soaked in the perfume and went to the street, where men gathered around her. Later, it was found that Rex was torn into pieces. The perfume intoxicated the men to the extent that they wanted to consume her. Sunny broke up with Juro, realizing how harmful their relationship had gotten over time.

There was a similarity between Sunny and Dorian's lives; they both had lost the people they relied upon. As Sunny struggled with her life, she kept the little perfume she had saved and buried it underground. But it was not easy to get away from Dorian. He went to her house, requesting her to be his muse. Using the perfume of lust, he tried to manipulate her into giving herself in. But as they were kissing, Sunny stopped and exclaimed that he could never create the perfume because he did not know what love truly felt like.

Later, Dorian kidnaps Sunny's neighbor, Stephen, whom she cares a lot about. His father was abusive, and she did her best to protect him. When he requested to stay at her country house with his girlfriend, she readily agreed. But she did not know that Dorian was waiting for her to make that mistake. Dorian had connected with a fellow Perfumier, Moritz De Vries. Moritz, an accomplished Perfumier, brought a machine for Dorian, with the help of which he could extract pheromones without having to cut into the body. The machine extracted the smell through pores.

Dorian kidnapped the lovers from Sunny's house and left their belongings there for her to come looking for them. As she entered the basement, he discussed how it was all a ploy to bring her there. He wanted Sunny to teach him the meaning of true love. He believed that she, her baby, and he were destined to be together. Sunny held his hand and crushed a glass sample container of the odorless toxic substance she had been carrying all this while. He would be unable to smell anything anymore; he had lost his special talent of distinguishing scents and navigating the world using only his sense of smell.

Dorion was imprisoned after he was found drugged in the basement. Even though he knew it was nearly impossible to fulfill his dream, he never stopped dreaming of formulating the perfume of love that he hoped to scatter all over the world so that people would no longer hate and only love would persevere. Sunny gave birth to her baby. She raised them alone. She could deal with the worst to protect her child, and Dorion was an example of it.

Even though Dorion never disclosed what the last element of his perfume of love was, we can assume that it was Sunny (or "the Pearl" as he called it). She smelled of her baby, and that was a smell he could never get over. Maybe the trap was for him to get hold of her and her unborn child. He was hesitant about the last element, indicating that it was something even worse than murdering women. A newborn is loved and adored by everyone, and we can assume that is the smell he wishes to recreate. He had the machine to extract smell through pores, making it easier for him to deal with the body and experiment.