Conclave review – Ralph Fiennes is almighty in thrilling papal tussle

There are some gloriously showy performance flourishes to be found in Edward Berger’s gripping papacy thriller Conclave. Prising open the doors of the Vatican to reveal the rituals and cynical machinations by which a new pope is chosen, it contains the most passive-aggressive curtsey in cinema history, delivered by the all-seeing Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini). This comes just after the good sister has delivered a truth bomb to the assembled cardinals, and it is so weighted with sarcasm that you wonder that her knees don’t buckle.

Then there’s Sergio Castellitto, playing the hardline Catholic traditionalist Cardinal Tedesco, whose pointed use of his vape at key moments of tension conveys more savage animosity and raw ambition than whole pages of dialogue. Even the silences are loaded with drama. As unofficial Vatican mole Monsignor O’Malley, Brian F O’Byrne has a delicious repertoire of fraught pauses – long seconds of nerve-jangling anticipation as he wrestles with his conscience before deciding to spill the tea about yet another of the eminences’ eminently regrettable little secrets.

What’s notable, however, is that for all the scene-stealing garnishes and ostentatious line deliveries elsewhere, the most memorable performance in Conclave – and in fact it’s among the finest pieces of acting this year – is also one of the most restrained. Ralph Fiennes is phenomenal as Cardinal Lawrence, dean of the college of cardinals, a position that places him second in Vatican seniority after the pope himself. After the sudden death of the pontiff, Lawrence finds himself saddled with the onerous responsibility of overseeing the conclave – the assembly of all the cardinals of the Catholic church to elect the new pope. The genius of Fiennes’s performance is that so little of it is worn on the surface. All the anguish, the grief over the death of his beloved leader, the churning doubts (and it is doubt, rather than faith, that is the engine driving this film) – all of it is internalised. We get hints, in the bowed back, the twitch of Lawrence’s mouth. And yet Fiennes draws us in. We are invited to share Lawrence’s turmoil rather than just observe it.

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The fierce intelligence of Fiennes’s work is magnified by Berger’s elegant direction. With its claustrophobic setting – the bickering, sniping men of God are sequestered away from the outside world – and opulent design (marble, frescoes and bold flashes of cardinal red feature prominently), this feels worlds away from the director’s previous picture, the multi-Oscar-winning German-language version of All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), which was more about mud than mud-slinging. But what both films demonstrate is that Berger has a gift for positioning the camera. The use of symmetry throughout Conclave is a potent indication of the stifling constraints and formality of this world; a shot from above of the cardinals in the rain, each sheltering under a Vatican-issue white umbrella, wittily evokes an earthbound host of angels. But it’s from the way that Fiennes is framed that we learn the most: Berger frequently places the camera slightly above him, an angle that deepens the troubled furrows on his brow and weighs further on his lowered head.

Based on Robert Harris’s 2016 bestseller, this is a meticulously researched work that excavates the arcane traditions and oddities that are unique to this Catholic ritual. But its appeal lies as much in its universality. Conclave is a story of a power struggle that, if you take away the zucchettos and robes, could play out during a political election – a fact not lost on American audiences (the film came out in the US in October). It could be a story of boardroom manoeuvring; an episode of Succession. It’s about a kind of combat, albeit one that only deals in character assassinations rather than actual ones.

Berger milks every last drop of tension and intrigue from Harris’s story, with cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine’s lens picking up on the eye daggers the rival factions fire at each other across the refectory. Equally effective is the ramped up use of sound, which amplifies Cardinal Lawrence’s laboured breath and scuttling footsteps, and the forceful, emphatic score by Volker Bertelmann, reuniting with Berger after their collaboration on All Quiet.

You may think that being locked in a room with a bunch of pompous elderly men deviously attempting to shaft each other wouldn’t be a lot of fun. But trust me on this: Conclave is a blast.

• In UK and Irish cinemas