Conclave (2024) Review: Edward Berger's Vatican Procedural Plays Like Le Carré in Cassocks

This review reflects the author's personal opinion. Trumpwatcher is an independent film publication, not affiliated with any studio, streamer, or festival. We do not cover political content.

A useful conclave review ought to begin with the building. Edward Berger's adaptation of Robert Harris's novel treats the Vatican as a character rather than a backdrop, and within the first three minutes of the film, Berger and cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine have shown the audience three distinct scales of space — the cramped private quarters where Cardinal Lawrence prepares his vestments, the marble corridors where rumor travels faster than footsteps, and the Sistine Chapel itself, which holds a hundred and seventeen voting cardinals like a snare drum holds a brush. The architecture sets the rules, and the film keeps them. That discipline is the entire reason this conclave review ends with a strong recommendation.

If you are deciding whether to give the film its two hours, the headline is yes. Berger has made a procedural thriller without action, a political drama without speeches, and a faith story that earns its third-act revelation by trusting silence in the previous hundred and ten minutes. It does not move at a tentpole pace and it is not trying to. The reward is in the precision of every choice.

What Conclave gets right

The strongest decision Berger and editor Nick Emerson make is the one that defines the genre — pacing dialogue beats over visual beats. A typical thriller cuts on action; this one cuts on the moment a cardinal lowers his eyes after a question he did not expect. Emerson trusts the audience to read those faces, and the audience repays the trust by leaning forward instead of slumping back.

The specifics

Fontaine shoots the procedural scenes — ballots cast, ballots counted, ballots burned — in static, symmetrical compositions that mimic the geometry of the room itself. The handheld camera arrives only when a secret arrives, and when it does the destabilization is felt before it is named. Volker Bertelmann's score builds on Vatican choral tradition but strips it to a single insistent string motif, sometimes paired with a long-held organ note that functions less as music than as a held breath. Suzie Davies's production design completes the trick: the corridors of the Casa Santa Marta are deliberately uniform, hospitable in a way that feels like hospitality designed by someone who has read about it. Every room is doing work.

Spoilers are kept to a clearly labeled section near the end of this review. Read on freely until you reach it.

Where the film loses ground

Two complaints, both fair. The first is that Peter Straughan's screenplay leans on a single character — Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes — to carry the emotional arc, and while Fiennes is more than capable, the supporting cardinals occasionally function as positions rather than people. John Lithgow's Cardinal Tremblay and Lucian Msamati's Cardinal Adeyemi register clearly; Stanley Tucci's Cardinal Bellini gets less interior than a viewer of Berger's All Quiet on the Western Front might reasonably expect, and the film is poorer for it.

The second complaint is that the third-act revelation, when it arrives, asks for a leap of trust from the audience as much as from the cardinals. Whether the film earns that leap is going to depend on the viewer's appetite for ambiguity — and on whether you have been reading the visual cues Fontaine has been placing in plain sight from the opening scenes.

How this film sits in its genre

The film is in conversation with three siblings: Fred Zinnemann's A Man for All Seasons (1966) for its trust in interior conviction over external action, Costa-Gavras's Z (1969) for its understanding that procedure can be a thriller in itself, and Paolo Sorrentino's The Young Pope (2016) for the way it allows the Vatican to be both sacred and political at once. Berger lands closer to Zinnemann than Sorrentino — there is no surrealist flourish here, no Sorrentino-style camera trickery — but he borrows Costa-Gavras's instinct that the rhythm of a procedure, well observed, can carry more dread than any chase scene.

For viewers comparing this to Berger's previous feature, All Quiet on the Western Front, the through-line is less the genre than the discipline: a director who trusts his frame to tell the story before the script does. Readers who enjoy that discipline will also find our guide to slow-burn cinema useful, and our forthcoming essay on editing and pacing drills into the kind of cutting Emerson does here.

Performances worth singling out

Ralph Fiennes gives one of the most controlled performances of his career. As the Dean of the College, he must hold the conclave's machinery in motion while quietly losing his own footing on the faith that justifies the office. Watch the scene where he discovers a sealed file in Cardinal Tremblay's office — Fiennes plays it with no dialogue, no music cue, just two small adjustments in his eyes and a single hesitation before he closes the drawer. That is film acting at its most economical.

Isabella Rossellini, as Sister Agnes, has perhaps fifteen lines in the entire film and uses every one of them. Her exchange with Cardinal Lawrence in the canteen — a single sentence about what the sisters see — is the kind of scene that demonstrates why a director casts an experienced actor for a small part: the part is small only on the page. Sergio Castellitto's Cardinal Tedesco is a more conventional turn but lands every conservative talking point as both a character beat and a structural pressure on Lawrence's choices.

A quick note on craft

A working conclave review has to credit Nick Emerson's cutting. Emerson lets a scene breathe past the point an action-trained editor would have cut — three, four, five extra seconds of a face working through a thought — and the cumulative effect is a film that feels longer than its runtime in the best possible way. The reverse shots are not symmetrical; Emerson favors the listener over the speaker, which is the right call for a film about what the cardinals will not say out loud.

SPOILERS AHEAD — read only if you have watched the film

The reveal at the end — that the newly elected pope is intersex — has divided critics on whether it lands as profound or as engineered. The argument for is craft-based: the film has been quietly preparing the audience for the idea that the Church's certainty about who belongs in its highest office is built on assumptions that were never as stable as the certainty implied. The argument against is that the reveal arrives via a single confession in a private chamber, and a film that has trusted silence and ritual for two hours suddenly leans on a monologue to deliver its argument.

Watching it twice, this conclave review lands closer to the argument for. The clue is in Bertelmann's score: the choral motif resolves on the same unresolved note in both the opening sequence and the final scene. Berger and Bertelmann are telling us the conclave has produced an outcome that is technically valid and spiritually open — and that those two things may not be the same. Whether you find that satisfying as a thriller climax is a matter of temperament. As a piece of craft, it is consistent with what the film has been showing all along.

The verdict

Trumpwatcher Score: 4.2 / 5

Rating: 4.2/5

Watch in theaters if you can — Berger's restraint and Fontaine's lensing reward the bigger room and the focused attention. If you missed the theatrical window, this is one to prioritize when it lands on a streamer you already subscribe to. For readers planning a double feature, pair it with Costa-Gavras's Z for the procedural rhythm or Zinnemann's A Man for All Seasons for the interior weight. Either pairing makes the case for the kind of thriller that does not need to raise its voice to hold your attention.

For more on the craft tradition this conclave review places the film in, see our archive of independent film reviews, and the methodology behind our verdict at how we score films.

This article is the author's independent critical opinion and does not constitute professional advice. Trumpwatcher is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any film studio, distributor, streaming service, festival, political party, or campaign. All trademarks, titles, and proper names referenced belong to their respective owners and are used for editorial identification only. We do not host, link to, or condone unauthorized copies of any film. Always watch films through official theatrical or licensed streaming channels.