Film Review | ‘Conclave’ Melds Politics and Faith

Feature filmmaking is a long, laborious, and uncertain process. Scripts can circulate among various hired pens for years before resolving into something filmable, production funds can become ensnared in the tightly wrung hands of studio executives, talent arrangements can unexpectedly fall through — the list of hazards goes on. Attempting to make a film that speaks to its political moment, then, can be a fool’s errand. By the time a filmmaker gets a chance to strike, the iron may well have gone cold.

With Conclave, German-born filmmaker Edward Berger, whose Netflix-produced adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front made substantial waves at the 2022 Academy Awards, manages to beat these odds. A glossy, gossipy, and sometimes soapy succession drama, Conclave peers in on the high-stakes political contest that unfolds in the wake of the Pope’s death. As cardinals from around the globe descend on the Vatican to elect a new pontiff, secreted ambitions and tortured crises of faith bubble to the surface, giving Berger’s outstanding cast — led by a stately Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence, whose man-for-all-seasons dignity chafes constantly against the realpolitik of elite clerical life — ample opportunity to chew production designer Suzie Davies’s lavish scenery.

At first glance, the film might seem at odds with any attempt to treat it as topical. The first rule of papal conclave, after all, is total sequestration. To ensure the integrity of the vote, all cell phones and tablets are dutifully sealed in plastic and closely supervised by a contingent of nuns led by the steely and severe Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini). By day, cardinals vote behind the lumbering wooden doors of the Sistine Chapel, hidden from prying eyes and inquiring minds. At day’s end, they are whisked away by charter bus to dim, bunker-like apartments with walls of slick, heavy marble. Windows are few and far between, battened down behind imposing metal shades.

Far from keeping the outside world at bay, though, this hermetic enclosure more or less ensures that Lawrence’s conclave will become a microcosm of it. Working from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel of the same name, what Berger offers is a story about the melding of politics and faith, about the perils of lesser-of-two-evils electoralism, and about how xenophobic and reactionary actors exploit both to erode the promise of progressive reform.

On paper, it all feels a shade too pat and familiar. Berger, though, knows better than to let the film tip over into a mere parable — who needs parables when the tragedy of our reality has already degraded into farce? At its best, Conclave instead raises broad, searching questions about what underpins our practices of political decision making in the first place. It is a film about the hard truths we choose to ignore on the brittle conviction that the devils we already know will be enough to get us through. From within the confines of sequestration, Berger crafts a timely story about the impossibility of keeping the world at bay, of taming it by rule and procedure, of flattening its volatile plenty into a pantomime of order and process. This might come off a little heady and staid, but Berger’s chic, sophisticated direction keeps things interesting. His starkly geometric compositions evoke some overriding sense of order, some unseen system that nudges the unpredictable rhythms of the world into a perceptible and manageable form; as above, so below. Conclave is all sharp right angles, crisp black and white linens, and neatly set tables. Walls and other background surfaces are often painted in contrasting light and dark shades, splitting the frame laterally into distinct visual domains. This is a world where opposing forces meet, but never overlap, where rigid binaries between light and dark, inside and out, and righteousness and sin are quite literally written on the walls. It’s a world of procedure and process, unequivocal and certain.

But as Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence observes in a stirring homily delivered just before voting begins, certainty is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This is because belief is fundamentally about risk. To believe in anything at all is to gamble on a set of possibilities you do not control, and of which you may not even be aware. If all things are certain, given over in some grand order (whether divine or man-made), neither the world nor God can ever call us to place our faith in something — or someone — we do not understand.

On the heels of Lawrence’s warning, Berger cuts to a shot of the assembled cardinals, their faces — all shades of black, white, brown — peering out from under their ornate habits, stark white and meticulously pressed. Startling, revealing, and almost funny, it’s an image that condenses Conclave’s central drama: not just the conniving and scheming that surrounds the election of a new pope, but rather the increasingly desperate scramble on the part of major global institutions to contain the volatile plenty of an evolving world. What Berger’s direction puts at stake is the choice between having faith in the possibilities of a world that will always exceed our designs upon it and clinging to those designs no matter how poorly they may fit, no matter how threadbare they have become.

This tension takes many forms throughout the film. Sometimes, it appears as a daring slash of red through a frame otherwise rendered in razor-sharp black and white, crackling on screen like a loose, dangling wire — a third rail of ambition and desire that runs alongside the tracks of formal procedure. Other times, it is the sound of Fiennes’s breathing, which often surges to the forefront of the audio mix, serving as a potent reminder of the all-too-human body that strains beneath the robes and rituals. Still others, it is a low rumble of unknown origin; distant at first, then, all at once, explosively close, crashing through the fantasy of sequestration.

Berger handles much of this with panache, pulling his rich symbology back from the brink of hamminess even as the scheming among cardinals veers toward the “I’m not here to make friends” bitchiness of reality television. Ultimately, though, the narrative’s pulpier impulses win out, overwhelming Berger’s steady hand. The film culminates in a twist finale so flatly contrived, so over-designed and overplayed, it feels as though it rolled off a production in a culture wars discourse factory. Too tidy by half, this late turn boils the narrative dry, chasing out the shades of ambiguity and, yes, uncertainty that Berger, Fiennes, and company so effectively cultivate elsewhere in the film. 

But even if it lands with a thud (or maybe a groan), the finale manages to sustain the film’s central question through to the final frames. Whether as gossip or as car bombs, an unruly world inevitably comes knocking. To face this world and the fears it inevitably stirs — really face it, rather than just dressing it up in familiar garb or domesticating it within old rituals and habits — we may be required to make a more profound kind of decision than the one we make at the ballot box. What might be required, Conclave suggests, is the preposterous risk of true belief.