The film is set during World War II and depicts a critically burned man, at first known only as “the English patient,” who is being looked after by Hana, a French-Canadian nurse in an abandoned Italian monastery.
The patient is reluctant to disclose any personal information but through a series of flashbacks, viewers are allowed into his past.
It is slowly revealed that he is in fact a Hungarian cartographer, Count László de Almásy, who was making a map of the Sahara Desert, and whose affair with a married woman, Katharine Clifton, ultimately brought about his present situation…
