Conclave review – Ralph Fiennes takes charge of tense papal election thriller

Like the easily devoured paperback it’s based on, pulpy papal thriller Conclave has a brisk, page-turning allure, filled with juicy intrigue and mystery, a beach read that would follow you back home after. We’ve become grimly accustomed to plot-heavy bestsellers such as this stretched out into indulgent 10-episode seasons of television (such as the recently misjudged re-adaptation of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+), a baggy over-extension of stories that demand a tighter grip.

So it’s a mercy of sorts to see All Quiet on the Western Front’s Edward Berger transform Robert Harris’s “unputdownable” pot-boiler into a brisk, contained feature instead, a two-hour escape to the Vatican that knows exactly when to drop us in and take us out. It’s a fairly dry set-up in theory but Harris and playwright Peter Straughan (who co-wrote 2011’s equally involving adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) have found humour and suspense in the fictionalised hunt for a new Pope, an election that propels a timely and tense political thriller, scheduled to be released in the US just days before a real one takes place.

Some of the nods toward its topicality were met with knowing laughs at its Toronto film festival premiere (a comparison to an “American political convention” and a sigh at having to make the less worst option) but it’s not a film straining too hard for such dot-joining. Because like any election, it’s a fraught one with high stakes regardless – here in a contemporary setting, there are competing sides hoping to push Catholicism either back or forward, to embrace diversity or to expel it. It’s one of the many electric tensions in the film, busied with debates over what a modern church should look like, what sacrifices must be considered and how hard it remains to convince some of the need to evolve.

After the death of the sitting pope, cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is forced to put aside any grief and focus on the urgent task at hand, putting together a conclave, bathed in secrecy to decide upon a successor. He’s closely aligned with the reluctant US candidate Bellini (Stanley Tucci), whose liberalism compels him to stand against the more traditional, and bigoted Italian Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto). They also face competition from the more powerful American Tremblay (John Lithgow), the increasingly popular Nigerian Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) and a surprise, mysterious contender in the shape of Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who has been working in Kabul.

The rules dictated by the conclave make for a neat escalation of suspense with no information technically allowed in or out. Lawrence isn’t keen to play Poirot but the more he finds out about the candidates from shreds of information shared by those around him, the more he is compelled to bend the rules, in need of hard facts over hearsay. Fiennes makes for a compelling and unknowable detective, operating under extreme circumstances as he also starts to rise in power himself, gaining votes he claims not to want. He has to work through his own morality compared to the church’s and weigh up the greater good with the personal cost and after being snubbed for playing a very different sort of manager in The Grand Budapest Hotel, one can see him returning to the Academy fold here, a quietly commanding turn, gently carrying the film on his shoulders.

It’s a thriller of character actors talking in rooms but Berger gives it a dynamism which makes it glide and after this and his Oscar-winning war film, one can see why he was briefly linked to the next Bond movie (a rumour he has enthusiastically denied). He guides a wealth of great performances aside from Fiennes, including a wonderfully imperious Lithgow and a steadily unravelling Tucci, with room for a scene-securing Isabella Rossellini as an observant nun who’s so fun to watch in just a handful of scenes that you wish she had just a bit more to do.

The film picks at knotty discussions (Is a black pope really a sign of progress if he holds vile views towards the LGBTQ+ community? How much can you tweak and modernise an ancient religion before it loses its shape entirely?) and I’d argue that sometimes it could have picked a little harder, leaving interesting threads a little under-explored. But the knottiest is left for the finale, when a twist takes the film to new and surprising territory. I predict some potentially furious discourse upon release but I think it’s handled here with just about enough maturity if taken the right way, an opinion that may not be shared by some.

The nature of the twist, together with the high volume score, some crowd-pleasing gotchas and some sinister vaping remind us that Conclave is a glossily transferred airport novel first and a deeper drama about the world of religion second. Given how few high-class thrillers of this scale we actually get on the big screen at this moment, I would vote for more.