A largely faithful adaptation of Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, Edward Berger’s Conclave narrates the election of a new pope after the sudden death of the pontiff.
The film draws on Harris’s research into the obscurities of the papal poll, which was also present in Fernando Meirelles’s quirky 2019 film about Popes Benedict and Francis, The Two Popes. Conclave’s cardinals are entirely fictitious, but the ritual of selecting the new pope aims for authenticity.
The lighting lends a film noir atmosphere by keeping faces half in shadow, apt for the skullduggery in which many of the main contenders are involved. The strong cast includes Ralph Fiennes (the British Cardinal Lawrence in the film, renamed from Italian Lomelli in the novel), Stanley Tucci (as Cardinal Bellini) and John Lithgow (as Cardinal Tremblay). Isabella Rossellini plays Sister Agnes, an assertive nun in patriarchal lockdown; an arch curtsy from her had the audience in stitches during the screening.
Stéphane Fontaine’s cinematography strikes a dreamlike note in certain scenes. Before the elections commence, Cardinal Lawrence must address a homily to the assembled cardinals, which causes controversy among traditionalists by stressing the value of doubt over dogma. His subsequent walk through the courtyard in slow motion, with cardinals in the background out of focus, perfectly signals Lawrence’s anxiety and sense of exposure.
A darkened breakout room with turquoise seats in which the liberal faction strategises – and in which a pivotal crisis meeting occurs later on – resembles nothing so much as a cinema auditorium. Towards the end, a high-angle wide shot looking down on the umbrella-wielding cardinals in white and pink crossing a rainy courtyard, somehow recalled for me the dancing mushrooms in Disney’s Fantasia.
Commercial cinema needs to attract a wide audience, so Conclave, like The Two Popes, has to depict the church in ways that make sense to audiences of different faiths or none (me included). It works here as a sort of political thriller, avoiding the mystifications of the likes of The Da Vinci Code and lurid conspiracy theories available on the internet and social media.
It does so while offering a spectacle of ritual, costume and setting (such as a recreated Sistine Chapel) that taps into the visual pleasures of period drama. In The Two Popes, cutaway shots of the chapel ceiling were used for comic effect – memorably, a painted figure doing a facepalm. In Conclave, following the novel, Michelangelo’s frescoes signal the presence of the holy spirit.
Between their lodgings and the chapel, the cardinals are in enforced isolation, cut off from rumours from Rome, not to mention the media. Unlike politicians, they are not undermined by insiders Whatsapping sympathetic journalists. Instead we have a state ruled by a caste of religious bureaucrats sealed off from the everyday world and the immediate concerns of the public, at least temporarily.
As in political biography, the character and follies of flawed individuals drive the narratives, rather than channelling wider social currents or political problems. Conclave offers what to elites must be a consoling vision of politics isolated from an irreverent voter base.
The opposition of reformists and traditionalists might initially be read as an allegory of the world’s decades-long shift to the right. We might see reformists standing for neoliberal managerialists – the outgoing pope describes Cardinal Lawrence as a manager – and the traditionalists as “populist” nationalists, with complicity between factions where needed.
Conclave finds its audience at the start of Trump’s second term, Keir Starmer’s first, and Macron’s left-excluding “unity government”, not to mention the continuing right-wing leadership of Georgia Meloni in the country that surrounds the Vatican City – and whose migration policies have won Starmer’s admiration.
However, Conclave’s cardinals display genuine socially liberal or arch-conservative convictions that are not entirely down to cynical strategising and vote calculations. Defeating the racist contender Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) is the main focus of the liberals such as Cardinal Bellini.
Some of the characterisations of Harris’s novel reached for stereotypes, such as the African churchman who is homophobic, even if striving for a “liberal” message in the ending. Pope Francis in Meirelles’s The Two Popes could stand in for the global south and perhaps a watered-down version of liberation theology. One of the contenders in Conclave is also from Latin America – and has a secret of his own.
If the message is that the church can modernise through egalitarian recruitment, surely this overlooks the fact that the church is a deeply entrenched hierarchical, patriarchal institution.
Changing the faces at the top in order to demonstrate a commitment to diversity without changing the structure and politics of institutions has been dubbed “elite capture” by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. But this kind of identity politics which leaves structures alone is more likely in secular liberal institutions than in a 2,000-year-old religious establishment known to move at a glacial pace, for which even such superficial nods to modernisation are unlikely.
Ending aside, the rest of the film seems more interested in offering us a soapy, ceremonial intrigue with plenty of opportunity for its cast to bring the scheming alive. In this respect, Fiennes’s mastery of registering revelations and quick turns of events through minute changes of expression and posture are one of the film’s greatest pleasures.
Jon Hackett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
