Rating: 9/10 | Director: Edward Berger | Runtime: 120 min | Released: October 2024

Edward Berger directed All Quiet on the Western Front in 2022 and then, two years later, made something completely different and equally accomplished. Conclave is set inside the Vatican during the election of a new pope, a film about men in robes conducting political maneuvers in ancient corridors. It sounds narrow. It is anything but.

The Setup

The pope has died. Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is tasked with running the conclave, the sealed process by which the Catholic Church elects a new leader. He is a man of genuine faith who has genuine doubts about that faith, which makes him a better observer of what unfolds than any true believer would be. As the cardinals arrive and the voting begins, Lawrence starts to notice things. Secrets. Alignments. A letter from the deceased pope that was never meant to be found.

Robert Harris’s novel, from which the screenplay is adapted, is a model of plotting: every revelation arrives at precisely the right moment, and nothing is wasted. Peter Straughan’s screenplay is faithful to that discipline. The film’s first hour is all architecture, character, and maneuvering. The second hour is a thriller.

Ralph Fiennes

Lawrence is a role that requires a particular kind of restraint. He is not a man who acts impulsively. He is a man who watches, thinks, and acts precisely once he is certain, and Fiennes plays all of that interior deliberation without ever making it static. The scene where Lawrence delivers a sermon to the assembled cardinals about doubt being a prerequisite for faith is the best speech in the film, and Fiennes delivers it with the precision of a man who has prepared it for months and feels every word of it.

The supporting cast is excellent across the board. Stanley Tucci as the progressive Italian cardinal, Lucian Msamati as the candidate no one expected to contend, and Isabella Rossellini in a small but crucial role all do exceptional work. The film populates its corridors with people who feel real and individual, not types.

What Berger Is Doing

Berger treats the Vatican as any institution through which power flows: not evil, not sacred, but human. The cardinals are not hypocrites, at least not most of them. They are people who have devoted their lives to something they believe in and who have also learned the specific compromises that institutional life requires. The film does not mock their faith. It takes it seriously, which is what makes the thriller mechanics land so hard. These are the highest possible stakes within the system, and the film makes you feel that.

The final act contains a revelation that divided some viewers but struck me as precisely correct. Berger earns it, and he has the courage to make the film’s final image genuinely ambiguous rather than reassuring. Conclave ends on a note of carefully calibrated uncertainty, which is the only honest note it could end on.

This is one of the best films of 2024, and one of the better political thrillers of the past decade. Berger has now made two exceptional films in a row in completely different registers, which is not a small thing.