The Scent

Plot

For the past two years, while on suspension for adultery with a police chief's wife, detective Kang Seon-woo (Park Hee-soon), has been running a private-eye agency specializing in adultery cases. He's also being sued for divorce by his wife, Hye-young (Cha Soo-yeon). A couple of days before resuming his old job, Seon-u accepts a case from a woman, Kim Soo-jin (Yoon Jae), who wears a particularly alluring perfume. She says her husband, casino billionaire Nam Yeong-gil (Jo Won-hee), is conducting an affair with another woman at a love hotel in Gapyeong, Gyeonggi Province, outside Seoul. Seon-woo checks into an adjoining room in the unmanned hotel and is met there by Soo-jin. Instead of immediately surprising the lovers, Soo-jin invites Seon-woo to a drink and seduces him. Seon-woo wakes up next to her dead body, and in the next room finds the husband also dead. The woman there says her name is also Kim Soo-jin (Park Si-yeon) and the dead man is her husband. Along with his idiot assistant, ex-con Gi-poong (Lee Kwang-soo), Seon-woo cleans the crime scenes and buries the bodies, realizing he's been framed for the double murder. Resuming his job at Jonggu Police Station, Seon-woo investigates the case along with two colleagues: the stubbornly procedural Seo (Kim Jung-tae), who dislikes him, and the easy-going Han Gil-ro (Joo Sang-wook), who admires him. Seon-woo has noticed that Soo-jin wears the same perfume as her dead namesake, and she admits she wanted a divorce from her husband, who used to beat her. Seon-woo questions the dead Soo-jin's boyfriend, gym trainer Lee Jin-guk (Kim Yun-seong), but the trail leads nowhere. As the terrier-like Seo comes up with more evidence that could eventually implicate Seon-woo in the murders, Seon-woo finds himself falling hard for Soo-jin and on a deadline to solve the mystery.

Cast

Box office

Despite somewhat negative reception from film critics, the film performed strongly at the box office. In total the film sold 1,246,185 admissions nationwide, with the success of the film largely attributed to Park Si-yeon's numerous nude scenes.