Conclave: the hunt for a new pope begins in Edward Berger’s ecclesiastical hoot

• Reviewed from the 2024 San Sebastian Film Festival. 

Faithfully adapting Robert Harris’s 2016 page-turner about a fictional papal election, director Edward Berger and screenwriter Peter Straughan have constructed a sturdy frame within which their outstanding ensemble of actors can excel. Conclave is an engrossing ecclesiastical hoot which elegantly compresses a prestige-miniseries’ worth of meaty intrigue and lively incident into two brisk hours.

While the film is Berger’s sixth feature-length work for cinema, it is his first mainly in English – with smatterings of Latin, Italian and Spanish – and his recent experience in anglophone TV (Patrick Melrose (2018), The Terror (2018), Your Honor (2020)) pays dividends. Ostensibly dead-serious in its probing of faith and doubt among Catholicism’s highest echelons, Conclave quite deliberately uses deft, intelligent comedy to make its points.

Much of the dry humour emerges from the film’s not-so-novel revelation that pious “princes of the church” are prey to the same flaws, vanities and jealousies that afflict the rest of us. They are presented as the petty-minded, politicking vessels through which the divine will is executed – the conclave’s purpose being (amid much ritual and grandeur, both convincingly portrayed here) to identify God’s preferred candidate for pope.

It’s strongly implied that strings are indeed being pulled by Him Upstairs: the third act arrestingly kicks off via an out-of-the-blue development that is decidedly ‘deus ex machina.’ By this stage five inconclusive ballots have been held (confidential voting conducted behind locked doors in the Sistine Chapel), the contenders’ fortunes fluctuating as progressive and conservative wings vie for primacy. The picture’s focus and sympathies lie unambiguously with the former group, who we see gossiping in the shadowy corners of the Vatican.

They include the cardinal tasked with managing the electoral process, Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) and acerbic, astute Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), who is regarded by Vatican-watchers as the clear favourite to prevail. But Vatican lore famously counsels that “a fat Pope follows a thin one,” i.e. a progressive pontiff will usually be succeeded by a conservative.

The traditionalists, who still seethe at the reforms enacted during the brief but epochal papacy of John XXIII (1959-1963), are spearheaded by the softly-spoken Nigerian cardinal, Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) and the volubly blowhard Patriarch of Venice, Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), who furtively puffs on a cardinal-red vape. Amid the fractious jockeying, a compromise candidate appears in the form of seemingly mild-mannered Canadian, Tremblay (John Lithgow). But such is the nature of this ‘race’ that, no sooner has an individual emerged from the pack, some disaster or scandal knocks him out of contention.

Audiences won’t need the prophetic powers of St Malachy to guess who will prevail. But the point is the (consistently pleasurable) journey, not the destination. And the film duly takes us there – then somewhere else again.

Shot in handsome widescreen by Stéphane Fontaine, with a scattering of stately, grace-note tableaux – Conclave is buoyed by its mordant wit. In an entertaining and nuanced performance, Tucci makes the most of the script’s drolleries. Isabella Rossellini has a big impact despite her limited screen-time as the all-seeing, all-knowing nun Sister Agnes; perennial “that guy” character-actor Brian F. O’Byrne again impresses on the margins as Lawrence’s chief assistant, Monsignor O’Malley.

As conduit to the outside world during the conclave’s periods of strict sequestration, O’Malley is responsible for the off-screen detective-work which propels the plot; Lawrence’s discreet snooping meanwhile places him in the literary lineage of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown books. But at least as much time is devoted to his quietly tormented spiritual state, the chief source of pathos here.

During the final ballot, Lawrence’s searching glance finds the Sistine’s shattered windows, through which external sounds are audible – most prominently, birdsong. Several previous scenes had taken place in a drab office featuring caged, chirping birds, suggesting that the Holy Spirit (traditionally depicted in Christian art as a dove) has now become liberated, allowing the divine intercession to belatedly occur. Such touches rank among the more restrained aspects of a sound-design, which generally tends to operate at the other end of the scale, doing much of the creative heavy-lifting.

Conclave is often a rather clangorous affair, and Volker Bertelmann’s orchestral score –  his was one of four Oscars won for Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) – is also inescapably prominent. And when we meet the freshly-anointed pope, the climactic applause is thunderous indeed, a crescendo of infectious jubilation – the holy racket setting up a calm coda during which one last bombshell is quietly detonated.

► Conclave arrives in UK cinemas 29 November.