A film bathed in fog and Medieval earth tones, “The Name of the Rose” is an M.C. Escher labyrinth populated with Hieronymous Bosch grotesques.

It’s a throwback epic of the quasi-Biblical school, the “El Cid” of the ’80s — grand, ambitious, a huge canvas enfolding big themes and ideas and performed by larger than life actors. And like “El Cid,” it was dismissed and under-appreciated, somewhat justifiably so.

But back then I was one of those annual-pass riders on the Jean-Jacques Annaud train, utterly bowled over by his “Quest for Fire,” a big fan of “The Bear” and someone who was sure Annaud would become The New David Lean — a maker of challenging epics for the masses. His debut feature, “Black and White in Color,” won the best foreign language film Oscar back in 1976. But it wasn’t until he grabbed the big canvas that he made his mark.

Umberto Eco was a famous semiotician whom I first read in grad school, where one was encouraged to view cinema through the interpretation of signs and symbols included on the screen. But he became one of Italy’s most famous novelists the day he plunged into this Medieval murder mystery epic.

“I felt like poisoning a monk,” he quipped, when describing the compulsion to write “The Name of the Rose.”  

Annaud took on this project after his breakout “Quest for Fire.” And despite bringing his “Fire” good luck charm, a VERY young Ron Perlman, despite casting a “has-been” former James Bond (Sean Connery), a former Bond villain (Michael Lonsdale) and newly-minted “Amadeus” Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham as his titanic leads, he had trouble getting this enterprise off the ground.

Even though most of them were willing to commit to the bald-bowl cuts it took to play their roles with accurancy.

The book was too daunting in period piece scale, despite being essentially a genre murder mystery thriller set long before The Age of Reason, before the first “detective” or first detective story.

You’d need a castle (Castle Rocca di Calascio, in central Italy) to pass for a 14th century abbey/fortress. You’d need a real monastery in Germany (Kloster Eberbach) just for the interiors you couldn’t build on a soundstage.

Four screenwriters boiled down the story of serial killing and punishment, faith and heresy, Church dogma and the Inquisition all meeting, debating and wrestling for primacy in a monastery with a great library where books are meant to “preserve knowledge,” not to dissimenate it.

Book burning and “witch” burning and theocratic “law” administered by fanatics make this film of that book as timely today as it ever was.

There’s a gathering of the various Christian orders for a theological debate in the winter of 1327. Our narrator is an old man remembering those days, but back then Adso (Christian Slater, two years before “Heathers”) was but a novice, learning at the feet of a Franciscan thinker and man of reason, William of Baskerville (Connery).

They’re greeted at the abbey by the abbot (Lonsdale). But one look at the lad (check out the Cover Girl makeup on Slater) has another monk pass on a warning.

“Have you not heard? The Devil is hurling beautiful boys out of windows?”

William has an old friend (William Hickey, nominated for an Oscar for “Prizzi’s Honor” that same year) there who is sure the monastery is seeing The Book of Revelations play out in the deaths among the brothers, with the younger and most “beautiful” particularly vulnerable.

Veteran character actor Feodor Chaliapin Jr. plays the blind and thus most fanatical of the monks, another adherent of “The Evil One’s” influence there, and film fans of the era would have recognized the oft-employed Elya Baskin among the many monks in this “scriptorium” monastery, transcribing and illuminating ancient texts for future generations.

If you’ve ever visited Dublin’s Book of Kells, or seen the animated delight “The Secret of Kells,” you have an idea of the work and its importance to civilization.

The abbot knows William of Baskerville’s “reason and deduction” reputation. And William, with or without his prototype spectacles, straight away sees problems with the “supernatural” theory of the first death he encounters.

The monastery’s famous library is kept locked away. Those transcribing and illuminating the books are the ones dying. And the abbot and his fellow senior monks are missing obvious clues. The alternately “foolish boy” or “clever boy” at his side is there for William to explain his version of forensics to, mainly for the benefit of the viewer.

“We are very fortunate having such snowy ground here” he purrs. “It is often the parchment on which the criminal unwittingly writes his autobiography.”

More monks will gather for the Big Debate.

The poor, starving serfs whom the abbey’s walls and gate keep out are treated like illiterate, insensate beasts, which is how the learned Latin speakers regard them, taxed and tithed in their poverty to finance papal luxury.

The Franciscans, at least, will notice. But the Inquisitor Benardo Gui (Abraham) is coming to make sure the Fear of God is put into one and all.

The semiotician Eco no doubt took delight in littering this mystery with suspects as physical “types,” which Annaud visualized via casting — the plump, boy-coveting monk (Michael Habeck), the mad “hunchback” (Perlman), the fanatic (Chaliapin) whose blindness is both literal and metaphorical.

What stuck in my memory in the many years since I’d seen the film was its climax and the solution to the mystery. What hits me re-watching it now is the level of commitment in the performances.

Connery got a tad fat and happy after his Oscar for “The Untouchables,” even if he never let us see him phone it in. But here he’s wholly engaged, giving a little of the twinkle that would be his late career trademark to a character whose very name says “The game’s afoot!”

Slater, not yet burdened with the snide spin on “cool” that became his 20something trademark, is stumbling innocence personified, especially in the sexual realm.

Lonsdale made “chilly” a post-Bond villain career trademark.

And Perlman, years before his TV “Beauty and the Beast” turn remade him, is as manic and down and dirty as we’ve ever seen him — a mad jumble of languages, tics, hideous makeup with the grooming and damaged soul to match. He even sings.

Annaud spared no effort or expense in recreating this world, and the result is stunning in frame after snow-dusted frame. But one thing that really leaps out watching “The Name of the Rose” now is Eco’s ahead-of-the-curve assault on the Catholic Church.

From corrupt, whoremongering and even Satan-worshipping monks craving their “unnatural caresses,” to fat, rich Vatican oligarchs, none of whom give “their flock” any consideration, are depicted with all the Bosch-ugliness Annaud could summon and Eco could endorse. I was taken aback by how little agency the starving “serfs” have, how the feral beauty (Valentina Vargas) is treated like the dumb and mute “foul being” women are labeled by even the “liberal” William of Baskerville.

It’s “Planet of the Apes” primitive, as savage a takedown of the Church/The Faithful relationship as any I’ve seen.

The film’s unsatisfying climax and anti-climactic ending still merit demerits.

But if ever you want a reminder of what filmmakers used to undertake to create an “epic,” you don’t have to go back to Lean and Kubrick, DeMille and Ford to find examples. Annaud and Herzog and a few others undertook Herculean tasks and made movies in that pre-digital era that awe us to this day, filmmakers who suffered for their art and made sure the cast and the audience suffered right along with them in their pursuit of greatness.

Rating: R, graphic, gruesome violence, explicit sex, nudity

Cast: Sean Connery, Christian Slater, F. Murray Arbraham, Michael Lonsdale, William Hickey, Elya Baskin, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., Valentina Vargas and Ron Perlman.

Credits: Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, scripted by Andrew Birkin, Gérard Brach, Howard Franklin and Alain Godard, based on the novel by Umberto Eco. A Constantin Films production, released by 20th Century Fox now on Tubi, Youtube, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:12