Le Musk

Le Musk
Information
VR/AR	Virtual Reality
Developer	ARR Studios
Platform	Positron Voyager VR motion chair
Type	Experience
Genre	Drama
Play Area	Seated
Release Date	May 2022 (world premiere, Cannes XR)
Website	https://lemusk.com/

Le Musk is a virtual reality film directed and scored by the Indian composer A. R. Rahman, his debut as a director. Its makers bill it as a "cinematic sensory experience": viewers watch the stereoscopic 360-degree film through a VR headset while seated in a motion chair that adds movement, haptic effects and scents timed to the story. Nora Arnezeder stars as Juliet Merdinian, an orphaned heiress and musician who, 20 years after losing her parents, tracks down the men who changed her life through her memory of their scent.

A four-minute prelude was shown at the NAB Show in Las Vegas in April 2017, and the finished film had its world premiere in May 2022 in the Cannes XR programme of the Marché du Film, the market held during the 75th Cannes Film Festival. It has since played as a ticketed location-based attraction in Los Angeles, Toronto and Singapore, was shown in India at the India Game Developer Conference in 2025, and was adapted for a fulldome theatre in Vancouver in 2026.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Credits, cast, synopsis, production, chair and scent technology, release history, reception quotes and the 2023 Monolith award checked against the cited Marche du Film, Gulf News, TechRadar, Display Daily, CBC, Tabla, Time Out, CSR Journal, Dome and AWN sources. About review dates.

Synopsis

The protagonist is Juliet Merdinian, an orphaned Armenian heiress and musician. Twenty years after she was orphaned, she sets out to find the men who changed her destiny, guided by one memory: their scent. The official website describes her as "on the trail of three mysterious men with distinct scents". The premiere announcement from the Marché du Film called the story a tale of revenge and noted that one scent, which it calls "Muskan", stays with Juliet throughout her life.

Cast

Nora Arnezeder plays Juliet, with Guy Burnet in the other lead role, as a musician; Munirih Grace and Mariam Zohrabyan complete the main cast.

Production

Development

Rahman developed the story from an original idea by Saira Rahman, his wife at the time; the two shared an interest in perfume and wanted to use scent as a narrative device in immersive cinema. In a director's statement on the film's website, Rahman says she had asked him why scent was not often used to tell stories in cinema, and that around the same time a friend gave him his first VR headset. A 2025 interview with Rahman in the Singapore newspaper Tabla dates the idea to a 2015 conversation in Los Angeles with friends and Saira. The screenplay is by Gurachi Phoenix.

In February 2017 Rahman appeared at the Toronto media launch of Ideal Entertainment, a new Canadian film and music production company, and named it as the partner for his directorial debut, which CBC News described at the time as a virtual reality short. The film is produced by Rahman's ARR Studios, with Ideal Entertainment and Intel as co-producers and Thenandal Studio and Palani Andavar Holdings as associate producers. Ravindra (Ravi) Velhal, a global content technologist at Intel, is executive producer and VR technology director. Infinity Festival Hollywood scheduled a fireside chat between Rahman and Velhal on the film's development for its 3 and 4 November 2021 event. TechRadar described Le Musk as Rahman's second film, after 99 Songs (2021), which he wrote and produced. The 2026 announcement of the Vancouver adaptation credits the film to his production company ARR Immersive Entertainment.

Filming and post-production

The Marché du Film announcement says the film was shot in Rome on 14 different cameras, post-produced in a stereoscopic 360-degree VR workflow at a higher resolution and frame rate, and finished by 10 visual effects companies with close to a petabyte of data. At NAB 2017, Rahman told Display Daily that the team had used Jaunt and Red cameras for capture and that "stitching was a nightmare". On the film's website Rahman says Rome was chosen as a backdrop because the city was "sacred to art movements and perfumes".

According to the 2025 Tabla interview, the film took seven years to complete, was shot in Rome, Bosnia and Armenia, and involved teams in Chennai, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Ukraine; the music was recorded in Budapest and one song was produced in Paris. Tabla reported that Rahman funded much of the project himself, and he said that it "ended up costing 40 to 50 times more than we expected".

Music

Rahman composed the score. The soundtrack album, 12 songs spanning jazz, orchestral and world music, was released worldwide on 21 August 2024 through Believe Music. Contributors include Nora Arnezeder, Sana Moussa, Linda Lind, Mayssa Karaa, Hiral Viradia, Simona Gilbert, the Firdaus Orchestra and the Budapest Orchestra; the music engineer Greg Penny also worked on the film. A piece from the film, "Scent of a Song", premiered at Cannes XR in 2019.

Viewing technology

Le Musk is designed to be watched in the Voyager VR motion chair made by Positron, a Los Angeles company. The chair combines motion, scent, immersive sound and haptics with the headset image. TechRadar quoted Positron's own description: guests sit in "what looks like a half-open egg-shaped lounge chair", and while they watch the film "the pod moves" and "turns, whirls, releases odors and provides other haptic feedback". Voyager chairs already offered haptic feedback, 3D spatial audio and motion; Display Daily reported that scent was a new capability added for NAB 2017 and that Rahman was the first director to use commissioned scents on the platform. The four-minute prelude shown there used three scents designed by the olfactory artist Grace Boyle. On scent delivery in VR more broadly, see Digital scent technology.

Display Daily reported that Rahman liked the chairs because they help reduce motion sickness and help shape the narrative by controlling the viewer's point of view. In 2025 Tabla reported that the film uses 12 distinct aromas. The same article reported that the custom chairs were first quoted at up to Rs 70 lakh each and that Rahman later worked with a manufacturer in Coimbatore that brought the cost down to a third of that quote.

Release

Date	Venue	Notes
April 2017	NAB Show, Las Vegas	Four-minute prelude; clips shown for the first time on three Positron chairs at the Intel booth
2019	Cannes XR	"Scent of a Song" from the film premiered
May 2022	Cannes XR, Marché du Film, 75th Cannes Film Festival	World premiere, shown in Positron Voyager chairs
November 2022 to February 2023	Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles	Showcase listed on the official website
Until 29 January 2023 (playing by 2 December 2022)	Lighthouse Immersive, 1 Yonge Street, Toronto	37-minute presentation with motion, scents and haptics
From 11 May 2025	Golden Village, Suntec City, Singapore	Limited run with 50 seats per day; the official website lists it as running from May to November 2025
5 to 7 November 2025	India Game Developer Conference (IGDC) 2025, Chennai Trade Centre	India debut, presented by ARR Immersive Entertainment with Madras MindWorks
1 February 2026	The Dome, H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, Vancouver	Gala screening of a fulldome adaptation, with Rahman in attendance

The film was announced as running 36 minutes at its Cannes premiere; later screenings in Toronto, Singapore and Chennai list it at 37 minutes.

Dome adaptation

For Vancouver, the film was reworked for the fulldome format of The Dome at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, so that the imagery and music unfold in 360 degrees around the audience. Rahman said in the announcement that the adaptation "allows the music and imagery to surround the audience". The venue's page describes a curved screen driven by eight Christie 4K projectors at 10K resolution, a 20,000-watt Dolby surround system, and a prototype scent and wind system on selected VIP seats that releases seven fragrances in time with the film. As of October 2026 the official website lists Vancouver as "now playing", while The Dome's page shows no upcoming showtimes.

Reception

At Cannes in May 2022, India's Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur watched the film in a Positron chair and called it "a technical masterpiece with inter-disciplinary expertise coming together from around the world". The CSR Journal reported that the actor Rajinikanth saw the film in 2022 and called it "mind-blowing" and "one-of-a-kind".

Reviewing the Singapore presentation for Tabla, Reema Dudekula praised the premise and Rahman's willingness to take risks in a speculative format, but found the score "underwhelming", the headset heavy enough over the session to bring on a migraine, and the price high at "$40 for 37 minutes". She wrote that she noticed none of the 12 promised scents, suggested her pod might have been faulty, and concluded that the film "felt too amateurish for its time".

Awards

Year	Award	Category	Result
2023	Monolith Creative Awards, Infinity Festival Hollywood	Outstanding Cinematic Immersive Experience	Won

The award went to Intel's Ravi Velhal and ARR Studios' A. R. Rahman.

See also

• Cinematic VR
• Motion platform
• Digital scent technology
• Location-based virtual reality