The Name of the Rose

There are films you remember for a moment — a shot, a scream — and films you remember for a presence. William of Baskerville is the latter. The movie frames everything as the older Adso’s memory, but it’s William’s patient logic and unflappable methods that steer the story from scene to scene.

The plot is ignited when a young illuminator’s apparent suicide forces William and his novice Adso to pry into an abbey that prefers its secrets tightly shut. That simple investigative engine — an outsider using observation and argument to poke at a closed community — gives the film its forward motion.

Annaud’s 1986 film is careful about what it wants to be: a mystery and a moral fable about suppression and the control of knowledge, told on a scale that favours atmosphere and argument over spectacle.

At surface level it’s elegant and economical: an older Adso looks back as the younger Adso and his mentor William arrive at a remote Benedictine abbey in 1327 to attend a theological conference — and to look into a troubling death. That frame keeps the plot anchored even as the abbey’s walls start to close in.

What the story quickly becomes is a duel of approaches. William treats questions like experiments — he talks, watches, draws conclusions. The abbey, and later the inquisitorial presence of Bernardo Gui, answer with secrecy, ritual and coercion. The clash is intellectual and urgent.

Crucially, the investigation is not merely who killed whom. It’s about a locked, labyrinthine library: the forbidden repository whose missing contents form the central puzzle. The search for the book is also a search for why knowledge is policed.

Sean Connery plays William of Baskerville, and the film arranges itself around him. William is the kind of investigator who trusts questions more than proclamations — he privileges careful observation, conversation and a steady process of inference.

That temperament transforms the movie. Instead of shouting theology or piling up melodrama, the film chooses the slow work of close reading — of manuscripts, of gestures, of inconsistencies. William’s methods make the abbey feel like a puzzle to be slowly, stubbornly solved.

He’s also the film’s pivot: mentor to Adso, interlocutor to rivals, and the steady centre the audience can follow when the plot darkens and the abbey’s secrecy bites back.

Contemporary coverage and later notices singled out Sean Connery’s work in the role, and that recognition translated into awards — Connery received the BAFTA for Best Actor for his portrayal of William.

That kind of formal recognition matters because this is not a background part for a star. The film gives Connery the space to carry argument and interrogation rather than stunt or swagger, and industry and awards attention treated the role accordingly.

It’s fair to say the movie leans on its central casting choice; the credit line of Connery’s name is part of how the film sells itself as both a serious literary adaptation and a mainstream historical thriller.

Under the murder mystery is a steady worry about who controls words. The film repeatedly stages censorship and institutional control against curiosity and open inquiry, so the detective story doubles as an argument about access to knowledge.

That argument becomes concrete in the film’s physical and symbolic attention to books and libraries. The library is fragile — both materially and politically — and the screenplay treats the book as an object that can be hidden, weaponised or destroyed.

There’s also a clear, repeated contrast between reason and dogma. William’s empirical approach — question, observe, infer — sits uneasily next to the abbey’s deference to authority. The friction produces much of the film’s dramatic heat.

Finally, the movie is a moral education as much as a mystery: the relationship between William and Adso is a mentorship in curiosity and doubt, a passing of methods and questions rather than doctrine.

Annaud’s film is concrete about its world-building. Interiors were filmed in real abbeys such as Eberbach, while large exterior sets were built near Rome, and the production even commissioned hand-illustrated manuscript pages to give the library an authentic, tactile life.

Those choices fed the film’s personality: it doesn’t simply say ‘medieval’ — it assembles a material past you can almost touch. Production design and the clear involvement of historians and liturgical advisors keep the behaviour and objects feeling specific rather than generic.

Tonino Delli Colli’s cinematography and Jane Seitz’s editing contribute to the film’s tone. The movie frequently leans into dim, high-contrast lighting and composed, sometimes claustrophobic framings that underline the abbey’s maze-like spaces and the sense that knowledge is being buried in shadows.

A lot of the film’s texture comes from hands-on craftsmanship: set elements built to look period-accurate, manuscript pages painstakingly hand-illuminated, and practical lighting rigs designed to read like medieval lanterns.

Those tangible choices stop the movie from feeling theatrical in the wrong way; the props act like evidence, and that makes both the investigation and the symbolic value of the books feel earned.

There’s an 80s logic to this production: mid-decade European co-financing, a big-name international star, and an appetite for adapting serious bestselling novels for wider audiences. The film sits squarely in that moment when art-house ambitions and commercial strategies met.

It’s also typical of how 1980s European cinema attempted to make literary work into cinema on a larger scale — multinational money, careful production design and the kind of casting that would catch attention across territories.

Annaud’s crediting of the film as ‘a palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s novel’ feels of its time too: an era that courted prestige by translating complex books into accessible, visually assured films.

Filming itself was a season-long undertaking, shot between late 1985 and early 1986 across German abbeys and constructed sets near Rome, which helped the movie present a convincing medieval world without softening the intellectual edges of the story.

If you’re interested in adaptations of Eco’s book, the 1986 film is the most frequently referenced cinematic treatment, but it isn’t the only one: the novel returned to the screen in a 2019 television adaptation.

Watching both versions can be instructive: one is a compact, star-led film, the other a slower, episodic re-reading that unpacks material the feature necessarily condenses.

The film earned national awards — including the César for Best Foreign Film — and it established itself as the high-profile screen version of Eco’s novel. That attention helped secure the movie a continuing place in conversations about literary adaptations.

Sean Connery’s BAFTA win for the role also marked a visible moment in his career, one that reviewers and career summaries link to renewed commercial interest in him at the time.

Finally, the fact the story was adapted again in 2019 underlines the novel’s continuing appeal and confirms the 1986 film’s place as the go-to cinematic reference point for Eco’s work.