The Name of the Rose (Season 1)

The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa, 2019) is an Italian-German miniseries you can watch online on iFILM. Giacomo Battiato directs this historical mystery from Umberto Eco's celebrated novel, with John Turturro as the monk who solves crimes by reason rather than prayer.

Northern Italy, the winter of 1327. The Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his young novice Adso of Melk climb to a remote Benedictine abbey in the Alps, sent to broker talks between their order and the papal court at Avignon. Then the monks start dying. William reads the deaths like a detective reads a scene — through marks, ciphers and a forbidden book hidden somewhere in the abbey's labyrinth of a library, a book someone will kill to keep buried. Rupert Everett plays the inquisitor Bernard Gui, a man whose idea of justice ends at the stake.

Eight episodes give Eco's story the room the 1986 film never had: space for theological argument, the politics of Franciscan poverty, and a slow tightening noose of suspects. It is handsomely shot and grim, made for viewers who like their medieval whodunits patient and brainy. Stream The Name of the Rose (2019) online on iFILM.