use Storable qw/thaw/;
use Data::Dump qw/dump/;
use Encode qw/decode decode_utf8/;

my $file = shift;

open (my $fh, "<:raw", $file) || die $!;
my $contents = join '', <$fh>;

dump thaw $contents;

##</code><code>##

$contents = decode_utf8($contents);

##</code><code>##

$ perl -v

This is perl, v5.10.1 (*) built for x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi
(with 61 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)
...
$ perl -MStorable -le 'print Storable->VERSION'
2.20