Conclave is an entertaining political thriller, set entirely within the Vatican’s procedure for electing a new pope. It gives a half-dozen great actors meaty roles as scheming cardinals, while also engaging, albeit at the surface level, with thorny questions of theology. Directed by Edward Berger, who made the somewhat overpraised 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front, Conclave was adapted by screenwriter Peter Straughan from the novel by Robert Harris. It’s a twisty, enjoyable film, which I don’t gather bears much resemblance to any real papal election that’s happened in the millennia-length history of the Church.
Ralph Fiennes stars as Cardinal Lawrence, dean of the College of Cardinals, and the man supervising the conclave, in which he’s also a candidate and an investigator, even though he’s begun to doubt his faith in the Church. The other big candidates are an American liberal (Stanley Tucci), an Italian conservative (Sergio Castellitto), a Canadian Machiavellian (John Lithgow) and a Nigerian (Lucian Msamati) who aims to become the first African pontiff.
Also hanging around is Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), a Mexican who’s ministered in some dangerous places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and whom none of the other cardinals have even heard of. And Isabella Rossellini too, as a nun who we can tell exercises power behind the scenes, even if she doesn’t speak in the first half of the meeting.
This is all intriguing, and the script sets up mysteries and pays them off well. The performances are first-rate, led by a quiet and understated Fiennes. Lithgow’s outstanding as the Holy See’s leading social climber, while Castellitto eats up a couple of scenes as a mustache-twirling villain. I’m intrigued by Diehz, who has no previous feature film credits and seems to be a man of mystery.
Does this film have anything new or brave to say about the Catholic Church as an institution? Not really. One gets the indication that the filmmakers are sympathetic to a more liberal itineration of Catholicism, but not overtly hostile to the Church itself. Yet, that’s not how the conservative faction has received the film.
Meanwhile, what happens at the end, while shocking, probably wouldn’t stay a secret for long, especially if a certain other character did as much investigating as he should. It’s one of those films that might fall apart if the plot continued for 12 more hours. Conclave is a superior film to the talky The Two Popes from a few years ago, which also used the formula of Vatican intrigue plus great veteran actors in an attempt to collect Oscars. However, The Young Pope, Paolo Sorrentino's HBO mini-series that starred Jude Law as a charismatic, power-mad American pontiff, was more daring, and also more formally adventurous.