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This article was published 25/10/2024 (685 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Balancing intelligent theological discourse and pulpy cinematic pleasures, this ecclesiastical melodrama starts with the death of a much-loved reforming pope.

Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the dean of the College of Cardinals, is in the throes of a spiritual crisis, but it falls to him to run the papal conclave that will choose the Holy Father’s successor.

As Catholic cardinals from around the world converge on the Vatican, the election unfolds amid buried secrets and sudden revelations, urgent footsteps on marble floors and hushed conversations under frescoed ceilings.

In a cloistered, centuries-old ritual that could have crucial implications for the future of the Church, Cardinal Lawrence struggles to hear God’s voice while he’s beset by the clamouring concerns of men.

Handsomely produced and expertly acted, Conclave is adapted from the book by Robert Harris. Known for such bestselling historical thrillers as V2, Munich and An Officer and a Spy, the English journalist-turned-novelist tends to combine copious research with page-turning narrative hooks.

Director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) and scripter Peter Straughan (who worked on the 2011 adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) catch some of that vibe with this high-toned potboiler, which offers smart, talky scenes but rolls them into a storyline that stays (mostly) taut and tense.

Cardinal Lawence is our guide into this unfamiliar world, and Fiennes layers the character’s spiritual anguish and moral toughness into a strong lead performance — possibly a career best.

He’s backed by an ensemble of pros that includes John Lithgow as Tremblay, an ambitious cardinal from Quebec, and Stanley Tucci as Bellini, the great liberal hope. Italian star Sergio Castellitto is Tedesco, the conservative who wants to go back to the Latin liturgy, and Lucian Msamati is Adeyemi, trying to pull together a coalition that will make him the first African pope.

There is also a previously unknown cardinal who arrives late, the quiet, thoughtful Cardinal Benitez (Vancouver-based Carlos Diehz), currently ministering in Kabul, Afghanistan, after a series of dangerous, difficult posts.

Berger gives a stately pace to the rituals of the papal conclave, as votes are cast, counted and announced. Filmed in Rome — though not in Vatican City, with the Sistine Chapel scenes painstakingly re-created on a soundstage at the Cinecitta Studios — Conclave brings detailed attention to its ravishing production design.

It’s important to remember, though, that this is a fictional conclave involving fictional characters, and the film is essentially a thriller, a kind of super-specialized locked-room mystery. An ominous string score builds the tension, while cool, distant, formally composed shots track the shifting dynamics of the vying factions.

Cardinal Lawrence, who is expected to deliver a cautiously uncontroversial homily to open the conclave, throws aside his prepared speech and speaks from the heart. “There is one sin which I have come to fear above all else,” he tells the assembled cardinals. “Certainty.”

With this plea for doubt, tolerance and humility, Lawrence ends up inadvertently drawing votes. And when he tells supporters he doesn’t want their votes, they tell him that’s exactly why he has them. “Men who want to be pope are the ones who are dangerous,” suggests one cardinal.

There’s horse-trading and backroom bargaining, rumours and reversals, plots and betrayals. One can sense the cardinals trying to tally the votes by looking at lunch-table groupings.

The conflicts get so heated that at one point Cardinal Bellini says he feels like he’s at an American political convention. (Yikes.) And while some of the debates are specific to this setting — the role of women in the Catholic Church, for example — many of the cardinals’ discussions could be applied to the secular world, as they wrangle about the overlap between public service and personal ambition, the weighing of means and ends, the inevitable moral gaps when fallible humans serve a larger ideal.

The veteran actors are having a wily good time with all this back and forth, teasing out ambiguities and undercurrents with visible relish.

The discourse gets much clunkier and more didactic, however, near the end of Conclave, as the simmering suspense of the voting process gets topped by two big events — one from the outside world, one at the heart of the gathering. The story’s final twist, which will offend some viewers and intrigue others, is rushed through with unseemly haste.

That’s unfortunate. After two hours of wrestling in a nuanced, grown-up way over belief and doubt, Conclave seems to lose faith in itself — and its viewers — in those important final moments.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca