If there’s a pleasure to be found in a political thriller set within the velvet-draped echo chambers of the Vatican, it’s in the sense that every well-pressed cardinal is one false move away from revealing the bit of spinach stuck to his soul. Conclave is a high-stakes ecclesiastical procedural that wants to show you the secret arteries and clogged veins of the Catholic Church—not just a pageant of holy men, but a great, labyrinthine chess game shot through with acid and lamp oil. And if sometimes the chessboard feels more like a conference call where everyone has a different point to make but no one’s listening, the movie at least has the gall to try.
You find yourself pulled along by Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes, who does that rare thing: radiates both dignity and the jittery composure of a man who sleeps in his vestments). He’s our detective-poet-leader, herding robed cats while peeling away layer upon layer of scandal and intrigue. The script introduces us to a full deck of cardinals—each branded with the right kind of theological baggage to stoke a thousand arguments—but in the film’s restless efforts to name every ill plaguing Mother Church, depth is sometimes exchanged for breadth. Clerical corruption, social conservatism, the seductions of tradition, and the machinery of spiritual politics—this is a movie that wants to barnstorm through every closet in Rome, but it’s not always interested in dusting off what it finds.
There are moments, though, when the story pushes through its own busyness—the vaping cardinal, for example, is the kind of frazzled modern relic. Suddenly, between the incense and the murmurs, you get a whiff of the ordinary, flawed humanity beneath the robes: a reminder that even the saints among us want a drag between conclave ballots.
But if it’s acting you want—and who could blame you?—Conclave is a liturgy. Fiennes, with his undertow of sorrow and volcanic restraint, carries the film in his breast pocket. He can go from serene contemplation to thunderous rage in a flicker—the kind of performance that reminds you just how many losses a man can carry on a single, pursed brow. Stanley Tucci slinks in as Bellini, all sly warmth and knotted tension, turning what might have been a rival into a chess-playing confidant whose motives are as slippery as rain on marble. The supporting cast—John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini—move through their roles like seasoned clergy. The ensemble’s skill mostly eclipses the fact that not every subplot lands. There are characters who arrive, blink, and dissipate, but when you’re in a palace this crowded, sometimes a genius epaulet is all you need.
Director Edward Berger approaches the Vatican’s cloistered world with the measured curiosity of a tourist who suspects there’s more behind the doors than moldering saints and jeweled chalices. The pacing is contemplative, the atmosphere dense—a smog of plotting and prayer. Berger is wise enough to lace his operatics with shots of wit, to let a little sunlight in without denying the gravity of the setting. Occasionally, the camera lingers too long on ritual and reverence, and you might wish someone would slip a whoopee cushion on the Papal throne just to shake things loose, but just as the solemnity grows ponderous, a stray look or hushed argument yanks us back.
The film’s design is almost tactile—cathedrals swept in gold and bruised shadow, candlelight licking at the edges of intrigue. You could frame almost any shot and hang it in a small, grim museum. The play of darkness and light—especially within the Sistine Chapel—becomes the visual heartbeat, echoing the cardinals’ own backroom wrestling with right and wrong. The aesthetic is at once luxurious and suffocating—like being wrapped in brocade and heavy incense while someone whispers your worst secrets into your ear.
The soundscape is an invisible hand, too—a score that rises not so much to inspire as to knead the tension, carving out little pockets of dread and hope. The whispers, the footsteps echoing down marble corridors, the gasp of a well-timed bomb (because what’s a Vatican drama without a little fire and brimstone?)—all orchestrated to remind us there’s thunder rumbling under the cassocks.
If you listen closely, the screenplay occasionally throws you a scrap of brilliance—a line that cuts right through to the marrow of what it means to believe, or to doubt, or to scheme for power beneath scapular and collar. But some dialogue strains for poetry and lands on pageant, savoring its own solemnity a little too much, and the weave of subplots sometimes trips itself up, chasing significance but finding only melodrama. Still, the barbed exchanges and sly confessions are often witty enough to make you forgive the times the writers lose their way.
At heart, this is a film about power: who wants it, who deserves it, and the cost of claiming both grace and control. Faith here is not a soft halo but a heavy, dented shield. Conclave is best—most shattering, most human—when it admits that virtue is often lonely, compromise is messy, and even in the Vatican, salvation may be a matter of margins and maneuver more than revelation. For all its effort to catalogue every modern embarrassment of the Church, you end up wishing the film would have chosen a few demons and wrestled them to the ground, instead of cataloguing sins like a nervous confessor memoirist.
Still, when the smoke clears and we’re left with Fiennes’ battered, solitary figure pressed against a window, hearing the distant roar for a new pope—there’s a gut-level ache, a pang of recognition at the old drama: men, trembling in the dark, hoping their choices matter.
Conclave is not the final word on papal intrigue, but it’s a good sermon—moving, imperfect, full of flawed visionaries and candlelit betrayals. It stumbles over its own ambitions, but when it stands tall, it stands on the shoulders of its extraordinary cast. Is it “great”? Maybe that’s a word left to history. For now, it’s enough to say I left the theater still thinking—about faith, frailty, and the impossible, comic hope that the next savior will be more than the sum of his secrets. That’s worth the price of confession—and the popcorn, too.
