In the 14th century, William of Baskerville, an intellectually nonconformist Franciscan friar, and his apprentice travel to an isolated abbey to investigate a series of mysterious deaths.
Umberto Eco seems unduly dismissive of a film that had to excise his postmodern trappings and scholarly sidebars. But it hasn't just been stripped down to a tawdry whodunit. Here, albeit in a streamlined way, the whydunit matters as much, if not more.
