A young man arrives in the village where a bust of his father, a local anti-Fascist hero, holds pride of place in the town square. Yet this town is full of secrets, and the young man meets resistance and hostility as he attempts to unravel the mystery of his father’s 30-year-old murder. Based on a short-story outline by Jorge Luis Borges, the film is an elaborate web of friendship and betrayal, past and present.

"It's a very mysterious film that resembles a psychoanalytic therapy. The Borges story ​The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero . . . takes place in Ireland in the 19th century and follows a young Irish man investigating a crime that was committed many years before, a crime in which a hero of the revolution has been assassinated in unusually curious circumstances. The investigation that the young man is pursuing [in the film] is a kind of voyage through atavistic memory, through the preconscious. He is, in fact, in search of the figure of his father in his investigation and discovers a maternal figure represented by this woman, Draifa, who was the lover of his father and who has invited him here. In this sense I would say that the theme of the film is a sort of voyage into the realm of the dead." —Bernardo Bertolucci