Fang lies in a coma. Yang can smell the world behind his closed eyes-and something begins to stir.

Yang (Zhao Jiali) moves through life by smell. A rare sensory condition makes most odours unbearable; only lemon and disinfectant bring relief. Then an unfamiliar scent leads her to Fang (Xu Weihao), a stranger lying deep in a coma. His body is silent, and Yang can do little but watch. Yet behind his closed eyes, Fang is living another life – a place where childhood, fantasy and desire fold into one another. There, the sister who supported them as a masseuse returns as a woman in red, stirring a longing knotted with guilt and forbidden desire. Each dream pulls him deeper. Each scent makes Yang’s waking world feel less secure. Somewhere between them, the border between the living, the lost and the imagined is beginning to dissolve.

Writer-director Ma Xue turns smell into an invisible passage between reality and the subconscious. Ash Chen’s hypnotic cinematography gives texture to unstable memories, drawing us from clinical stillness into a dream-world glowing with danger and desire. Sensuous, unsettling and quietly provocative, “Aroma” keeps its deepest secret just beyond reach. Fang may be trapped inside his fantasy – but what if he is not the only one caught there?

Milani Perera