Conclave, director Edward Berger’s slick and sumptuous adaptation of a 2016 bestseller by Robert Harris, takes place in a setting virtually no one viewing the movie will ever have a chance to experience firsthand: the hushed halls of the Vatican during the clandestine process of selecting a new pope. When the incumbent pontiff, from all appearances a beloved and popular figure, dies unexpectedly, Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) finds himself tasked with running the top-secret council of cardinals who will gather to vote in the pope’s successor. The rules governing this ancient rite are rigid and highly ceremonial: The attendees arrive clad in full red-cassock regalia, and key parts of the proceeding are still conducted in Latin.
Lawrence’s own allegiance lies with the American candidate, Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a progressive who has made it clear he’s open to reform on issues like gay marriage and the ordination of women. But the candidate with the most support behind him is the conservative Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), an Italian who, once the council has been cloistered for the duration of the vote, freely shares his retrograde and racist views about the future of the church. Meanwhile, another North American contender, Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), and the Nigerian candidate, Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), are jockeying for their own places in the field. Just as the voting is about to start, the council is joined by a young Mexican cardinal, Benitez (Carlos Diehz), about whom little is known. The conclave takes place in an atmosphere of unrest, not just among the elite clergymen of the council, but in the world outside the Vatican’s magnificently frescoed walls. The exact nature of the political violence taking place just off-screen is not explained, but does it need to be? It’s 2024, and we’re in the middle of a high-stakes election.
Conclave is not a pathbreaking or formally inventive movie, but scene by scene it’s a powerful pleasure-delivery system. The pacing of the script (by Peter Straughan, who wrote the 2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) is expertly machined to provide a fresh plot twist every 20 or so minutes, culminating in a final rug pull that’s so out of left field it provoked a mixture of gasps and giggles in the screening I attended. (More on that further on.) The film is packed with splendid performances from such reliably brilliant actors as Fiennes, Tucci, Lithgow, and, in a near-wordless role that proves there really is no such thing as a small part, a flawless Isabella Rossellini.
Conclave looks lush and painterly, with the same attention to geometrical compositions and vivid color palettes as Berger’s previous movie All Quiet on the Western Front. There were some critics, me among them, who found that Oscar winner well crafted but a tad too tastefully somber. Those critics will be pleased to find that Conclave unfolds like a trashy airport thriller, with touches of humor, a steady drip of suspense, and generous lashings of melodrama. It can verge on the grandiose, especially when the score, by Volker Bertelmann, mounts to heights so portentous as to suggest, incorrectly, that these cardinals are all secretly in the service of Satan. But the swelling strings and hairpin turns all seem like part of the ecclesiastical fun—at least up until that confounding ending, one I’m still trying to decide how to feel about weeks after seeing the movie.
Here’s where my thoughts will steer into spoiler territory, so if you want to go in knowing nothing about what sets Conclave apart from your run-of-the-mill papal thriller—and what may make it the subject of controversy as we head deeper into awards season—stop reading here and come back once you know how things went down inside that sacred voting chamber.
First of all: One surprising thing about Conclave’s myriad revelations of clerical misconduct is that not all or even most of them involve sex scandals. There is one of those, involving a cardinal’s long-ago affair and out-of-wedlock child, and it does effectively throw that particular offender out of the running for the papacy. But the majority of the infractions committed by would-be popes in this movie have to do with money and power, not sex. A word crucial to the plot that you’ll be unlikely to hear in any other thriller released this year is simony, an archaic term for the buying and selling of church positions or privileges.
In one whispered conversation among conspiring cardinals in a stairwell, the Catholic Church’s lengthy history of covering up for child sex abusers is mentioned, and deplored in appropriately appalled tones, but it remains an abstraction: That criminal conspiracy never impinges directly on the movie’s story, and none of the assembled cardinals appears to have been implicated in any such crimes. The choice to leave out such a prominent real-life issue is understandable, given the movie’s resemblance to an Agatha Christie mystery or a game of Clue. These squabbling men of the cloth are there to be moved around like chess pieces, and the introduction of a plot element as horrific as mass child rape would make the playful use of suspense as a plot device feel flip and cruel.
The Daily Beast’s critic Nick Schager liked Conclave less than I did, but he has some sharp observations to make about it, noting in his review that the last big twist, an eleventh-hour revelation about the cardinal who is finally elected to the papal seat, “lands with a hilarious thud.” For the audience I watched it with at least, that description is not quite accurate. The climactic reveal did provoke some scattered laughs, but those struck me as guffaws of surprise, not derision. Translated into a verbal response, that laughter might have meant something like “You got me, Berger—whatever I was expecting, it was not that.” Coming just minutes before the movie ends, this closing shocker leaves the audience almost no time to reflect on the new issue it suddenly introduces into a movie that has been mostly about backstabbing priests, the spiritual hazard of personal ambition, and the struggle between faith and doubt.
So what is that climactic reveal? Well, over the course of several inconclusive rounds of voting, the favored candidates have dropped like flies as their reputations are befouled one by one. Two dark horses emerge from this war of attrition: Cardinal Lawrence himself, who’s undergoing a crisis of faith that makes him actively dread the thought of ascending to the papacy, and Cardinal Benitez, whose quiet, principled demeanor over the tumultuous course of the conclave has steadily won over supporters. In the end, Benitez is selected, and Lawrence, pleased that a man of true faith will now be leading the church, approaches the pope-to-be to clear up just one more question, one that remains unanswered from his investigation into this mysterious newcomer’s past: Why did Benitez make and then cancel a medical appointment at a Swiss clinic years before?
In the same gentle voice that has made him an outlier amid this cacophonous band of strivers, Benitez fills Lawrence in on the details: The appointment was for an operation that would have removed his uterus. Benitez is not a trans man but an intersex person, born with external male genitalia but female internal organs, a fact he himself never knew until it was discovered during routine surgery for appendicitis. Upon learning of his unusual situation, Benitez consulted with the now-deceased pope about how to proceed, and decided to forgo the hysterectomy and continue to live as the ambiguously sexed individual God made him. The papal name Benitez chooses for himself underlines his refusal to regard this choice as an error, a deception, or a sin: He requests to be known as Pope Innocent.
Typing this out in prose form, I can see why the final twist occasioned both laughter and some puzzlement in the theater. It’s provocative without quite being coherent, raising issues of gender identity and the place of LGBTQ+ people and women in the hierarchy of the church that the movie up till then has treated mainly as subjects for ideological debate rather than lived bodily experiences. There’s no question we’ve come a long way since 1992’s now painfully dated The Crying Game, in which the startling midmovie gender reveal—that the woman the protagonist is falling in love with is trans, a fact she thought he already knew—causes him to slap her in the face, then run to the bathroom to vomit before rushing out of her flat. (The two later reconcile and rekindle their courtship, which may be even worse.)
Far from feeling disgusted or tricked, Conclave’s Cardinal Lawrence appears pleased and maybe even amused to know that the next pope will be an intersex person—but why? Supposing that Benitez continues to live as a man, with the status of his internal organs known only to himself and a few confidants, how are we to assume he will lead the church differently than a cis male pope would have, given that the discovery of his secret would presumably lead to his immediate ouster? If there were a Conclave II, would the story be about an intersex pope struggling to come out of the closet?
Some traditional Catholics may be disturbed by this ending, with its implied critique of the centuries of privilege men have enjoyed in the church leadership. But I can also see an objection to it from the progressive side: After all, the existence of gender identities beyond the binary is being deployed here as little more than a gimmick, an eleventh-hour plot device to make the audience say “whoa!” in unison, rather than a subject of reflection and discussion. If, as seems likely to be the case given its prestigious directorial pedigree and distinguished A-list cast, Conclave becomes an increasingly major part of this year’s Oscar conversation, I can imagine the movie becoming a touchpoint for debate, not in spite of but because of its vague message about the triumph of liberal tolerance. It could become this year’s Green Book: a well-meaning but ultimately patronizing treatment of a social-justice issue that for many viewers is not an abstract principle but a core element of their personhood.
Conclave’s final reveal has little to do with Benitez’s experience of his own anatomical traits, or even with what he might do to improve the lot of others forced by church tradition to conceal their own physical reality. Rather, the ending looks with guarded hope toward what his ascent to the papacy might represent: a future, both within the walls of the Vatican and in the streets outside, where centuries-old patriarchal assumptions about power and sexuality can begin to be broken down and replaced by something better. Reducing the character to a symbol in that way could be seen as a disservice to the real-world complexities of sex and gender, not to mention the lived realities of intersex people—but given the puzzle logic of Conclave’s plot and the almost playful irreverence of its final switcheroo, I have trouble getting too mad about it.
