‘Conclave’ Review: Papal Succession As a Mystery Thriller

Ralph Fiennes has always done his best work under great constraints. Whether it’s the silly costumes and miniaturist specificity of Wes Anderson, Shakespeare’s language and the weight of the Balkan conflict in 2011’s Coriolanus (which he directed), or the monstrous evil of his Oscar-nominated turn as a Nazi war criminal in Schindler’s List, he seems most able to reveal devastating inner truths when the walls are closing in on him. Never have the screws turned quite so tightly as they do in Conclave, director Edward Berger’s screen adaptation of dad fiction favorite Robert Harris‘ 2016 novel about papal succession. 

Fiennes is mesmerizing as Cardinal Lawrence, the doubt-stricken Dean of the College of Cardinals who must organize and lead the secretive and tradition-laden process of selecting a new Holy Father. His every head tilt and slump-shouldered sigh is equally transparent and shot through with mystery.

Fiennes is but one of the formidable weapons in Berger’s arsenal. Unlike his concussively brutal 2022 breakout hit All Quiet on the Western, which was largely fronted by a cast of greenhorns, here his chess pieces are mainly veteran actors serving as both blades and the whetstones keeping each other lethally sharp.

There’s a terrific Stanley Tucci as a liberal-minded Cardinal whose desire to drag the Church in line with the modern world is matched by his cutthroat politicking. His rival is the archly conservative Patriarch of Venice; embodied with a gruff imperiousness by Italian actor and director Sergio Castellitto, he is a man whose thinly veiled racism comes to the fore when the Vatican roof falls in on the sequestered conclave, the apparent result of a terrorist attack. (Try as he might, Berger just can’t quit his addiction to explosive warfare.)    

Lucian Msamati, the pirate Salladhor Saan in the middle seasons of Game of Thrones, is the conservative Nigerian candidate whose historic play for the throne may be undone by a youthful indiscretion. And all of this backroom maneuvering would not be complete without John Lithgow and his piercing, overweening high tenor. Lithgow plays the initial frontrunner who may or may not have been tossed out of the church by the dying Pope. (I found myself wishing I had baseball cards of the prospective candidates to keep these Cardinals straight.) 

The chamber room machinations roll out like a locked-in-the-study Agatha Christie or humor-free Clue. The wild card in the proceedings—and the newcomer in the cast—is Carlos Diehz’s Cardinal Benitez, the Mexican-born priest who runs a below-the-radar church in Kabul. (In the book, he’s Filipino and practices in Baghdad.) 

There’s a cold war frost to the script, adapted by British playwright Peter Straughan, an Oscar nominee for 2011’s similar-in-feel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which he co-wrote with his late wife Bridget O’Connor. Volker Bertelmann, whose divisive but effective score for All Quiet on the Western Front took home an Oscar, once again shows his knack for spacious orchestration to underline a protagonist’s inner turmoil.

What is less brought to bear, though, is the depth of darkness and duplicity in the Catholic Church. The sex abuse suffered by parishioners and the decades-long cover ups by the highest level of the church is given merely a few throw-away mentions in the film. 

The week that I saw Conclave in a Beverly Hills screening room, the Los Angeles Archdiocese agreed to pay $880 million to settle sex abuse claims. Yet if a conclave like the one shown in the movie were to happen today, included among its voting members would be L.A.’s disgraced former Archbishop Roger Mahony, who remains a Cardinal despite having known about priests molesting children and choosing to protect the abusive priests and conceal the truth.

While Berger’s film should be applauded for envisioning a way forward for the profoundly troubled and still deeply corrupt organization, by not more completely and honestly reckoning with the crimes of its past, its optimism for the future—while both deeply felt and dramatically conveyed—ultimately rings hollow.