Writing about Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend,” the critic Manny Farber once declared that it was a movie “in love with its own body odor.” The same could certainly be said of “Perfume,” a sensually saturated ode to everything olfactory that takes delirious — even demented — pleasure in rubbing the audience’s nose in a bouquet of mythic psychopathology.

Director Tom Twyker (“Run Lola Run”) won the enviable challenge of finding a way for Patrick Süsskind’s massively popular 1985 German-language novel to make sense — pun intended — on the screen. To do so, he had to get a grip on the titular character, a cruelly neglected orphan named Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw).The bastard spawn of a Paris fishmonger, he was born with an extremely developed capacity for smell, and yet no scent uniquely his own. There is no odor he can’t detect, and barely anything he can find words to describe, for his gift of decoding scents is the only thing about him that is articulate and civilized. His nose is more akin to that of a dog, perhaps, and Grenouille is treated as poorly — an unwanted mutt passed from a rural orphanage into child slavery at a factory run by a brutal tanner, where he will be lucky to survive to adulthood.

Yet he does. Upon becoming a man, this wild child follows his nose out of the 18th-century squalor, which is re-created here with bleakly humorous attention to the crudest, cruddiest details, lensed through a blue haze with slasher-flick point-of-view angles so it all feels like a wallow in dankest Dickens. It’s giving nothing away to mention that almost immediately upon his return to Paris, Grenouille becomes drunk on an aroma unlike any he has known and trails it to discover a red-headed market girl, who — quite sensibly — flees the wretched waif’s presence. He finds her again, and in his effort to subdue her panic, suffocates her. The dead girl becomes a template for her naïve killer’s peculiarly nasal desire, which is as remorseless as it is ecstatic. He splays out her naked body and worships it, drinking in an essence he will — eventually — stop at nothing to distill.

Mr. Twyker shapes this obsession in fairy-tale terms. As the film progresses and Grenouille, the intense, cryptic loner, becomes both a pariah and a messiah, the story tweaks sensibility as much as sense. The movie cloaks him in ambiguity, never suggesting how you should regard him. John Hurt supplies the playfully arch narration, which insulates the novel’s homicidal arc within the airs of something meant to be archetypal — not tabloid fodder. Tricky camerawork and costumed foppery offer further detachment.

Through a stroke of luck, Grenouille contrives to apprentice himself to the once great perfumer Baldini (a bewigged Dustin Hoffman, in one of the more eccentric of his recent comic performances), who exploits the young man’s gift to reclaim his own faded reputation. Baldini sits slack-jawed as his new charge races between rickety shelves stacked with beakers and vials, whipping together mysterious cocktails of oils and essences. Schooled in the lore of perfume — the nearly musical chorus of “notes” that constitute a chemically balanced scent —Grenouille becomes consumed by Baldini’s tale of a paradisiacal perfume that wafted out of a pharaoh’s tomb, at once paralyzing and transporting everyone who smelled it. Soon he’s off to the legendary city of Grasse to hone his chops at a perfume factory, puzzling over his mentor’s allusion to a mystic 13th note that completes the world’s most perfect perfume, hiking alone through mountain paths erupting in floral splendor. (The movie goes so ga-ga over such vistas, you half-expect Julie Andrews to come choraling across the verdant expanse).

In solitude, Grenouille is content at last. The problem is, when he returns to city life, there are more lissome young women to tempt his nostrils, and soon he’s stalking more redheads (and blondes, and brunettes), utilizing his access to improved technology to boil them in vats and swaddle them in animal fat to glean their essence. The fairest of them all is Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood), the only daughter of a wealthy merchant (Alan Rickman, a man born for frilly cuffs). Her radiant tresses make her a dead ringer for Grenouille’s first, tragic infatuation. Run, Lola, run — indeed.

The movie’s final third, which basically concerns serial killing as a high order of connoisseurship, could easily pass for “CSI” as costume drama — or a stylish überbudget variation on the 1965 Herschell Gordon Lewis shocker “Color Me Blood Red,” in which a beatnik painter kills sexy babes for their sanguine pigments, the better to appease his snooty critics. Then it flips its own wig in a transcendent flourish of metaphor that probably accounts for much of the novel’s appeal, as its symbolism is vague enough for different observers to intuit its antihero as Hitler or Christ or, perhaps, the grooviest dude at Burning Man.

Either way, Grenouille captures lightning in a bottle. Mr. Twyker and his army of crew-members work overtime in their attempt to do the same. But while “Perfume” is a triumph of sensual extremism, its intoxicating effect fades pretty quickly. Maybe the allegorical drift is more pungent on the page. On the screen, it becomes as ephemeral as a vapor.