Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, is an engaging tour-de-force with a fantastic cast, an intriguing mystery, and a fantastic setting. Amazingly, Sean Connery’s career was in a bit of a lull when he lobbied for the part, one which, it seems, much like Bond, and Indy’s father, he was born to play. You can’t imagine anyone else in the role.

In fact, the entire cast has a wonderful international flavour that allows for some great depth of character, no matter what the script gives or doesn’t give to them to work with. Joining Connery is Micheal Lonsdale, Ron Perlman, Elya Baskin, William Hickey, Valentina Vargas and a seventeen-year-old Christian Slater.

Connery is William of Baskerville, a 14th century Franciscan monk who is travelling with his young novice, Adso (Slater), to a Benedictine monastery for a conference. On arrival, he learns that there has been a death – suicide? murder? – , and that is only the beginning as the story weaves around forbidden books, forbidden desires, and questions of faith and logic masterfully rendered by Annaud, who never loses sight of the narrative threads, themes, and arcs at work.

William has been in trouble with his order before, accused by Ubertino (Hickey) of thinking too much instead of trusting to god. William is clever and observant, and consequently just the right man to find himself in this strange mystery that has the monks believing evil walks the halls of their monastery.

Connery and Slater make a nice on-screen pairing, and there is a nice mentor-student, father-son relationship going on there that you believe in. Adso is young, curious, and not quite so clever as William, and like some other monks at the abbey, falls to the temptation of flesh in the form of a local peasant girl (Vargas) which leads to a sex scene that has been truncated to be almost non-existent on streaming platforms because of Slater’s young age at the time.

I love a number of sequences throughout the film, William is a great character for Connery, and he shines throughout, but I love the labyrinth scenes the best as his love for knowledge comes to the fore, especially when his life is in danger and his first command to Adso is to save the books.

The film delivers an engaging mystery that has a number of layers to it, and a situation that is exacerbated by the arrival of Bernardo Gui (F. Murray Abraham), an inquisitor for the Catholic Church, and you know that means interrogating and torturing. His presence puts a number of characters in danger as he’s not so much interested in the truth as controlling the narrative and the faith.

This is a great film with Connery in one of my favourite roles he’s played and it features a score by James Horner, and a fantastic Drew Struzan poster!