120 min | PG | October 25, 2024 | Focus Features
Edward Berger turns a papal election into a political thriller. Ralph Fiennes leads an extraordinary ensemble through Vatican corridors where every whisper is a weapon.
The Pope is dead. Cardinal Thomas Lawrence is the Dean of the College of Cardinals and it falls to him to manage the conclave that will select the next pope. He does not want the job. He is a man of genuine faith experiencing a crisis of that faith at the worst possible time. The cardinals gather in Vatican City. The factions emerge. The liberal candidate. The conservative candidate. The traditionalist. The surprise. Edward Berger adapts Robert Harris’s novel with the precision of a political thriller that happens to take place inside the Catholic Church. The conclave is a closed system. No phones. No news. No outside contact. Every conversation is a negotiation. Every vote is a power play. Berger understands that the Vatican is a government and papal elections are politics by other means.
Ralph Fiennes plays Cardinal Lawrence with the weary authority of a man who sees through everyone and trusts no one including himself. Fiennes communicates doubt through stillness. The weight of the responsibility sits on his face in every scene. He is magnificent. Stanley Tucci plays Cardinal Bellini, the liberal favorite, with an intellectual arrogance that masks genuine principle. John Lithgow plays Cardinal Tremblay with the practiced warmth of a politician. Sergio Castellitto plays Cardinal Tedesco, the reactionary, with bullish confidence and contempt for compromise. Isabella Rossellini plays a nun who runs the papal household with quiet authority and observes everything. The ensemble functions as a machine. Each actor calibrates their performance to serve the whole.
Berger directed All Quiet on the Western Front and brings the same visual discipline to a very different kind of warfare. The cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine turns Vatican architecture into a character. The ceilings press down. The corridors narrow. The Sistine Chapel becomes a battlefield. The camera moves through spaces with a formality that mirrors the rituals it observes. The production design by Suzie Davies is meticulous. Every cassock and crucifix and piece of stained glass feels authentic. The score by Volker Bertelmann creates tension from silence and organ tones. The editing is patient and precise. Berger holds on faces during votes and lets the actors do the work.
The film functions as an allegory for institutional politics in any context. The Catholic Church is a stand-in for every organization where power is disguised as service and ambition is disguised as faith. The final revelation is divisive and will strike some viewers as too clever. But Berger earns it by building a film that is fundamentally about the gap between what institutions claim to believe and what they actually practice. Lawrence’s crisis of faith is the film’s moral center. He wants the conclave to produce a good pope. He is not sure a good pope is possible. That tension makes the thriller mechanics feel like they matter.