'Is Conclave's twist ending offensive or divinely camp?'

When I want to see divas fight for a crown, my go-to is usually RuPaul's Drag Race. But in the year of our Lord 2024, a new alternative has arrived from on high in the last place you'd expect to look; The Catholic Church.

Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes (and a who's who of talent that casual audiences will likely recognise but fail to name), is perhaps the bitchiest film you'll see all year. Yet you wouldn't necessarily think so just based on the premise.

Warning: As might be expected, this article contains spoilers for Conclave

Drama kicks off in the Vatican when Cardinals assemble and sequester themselves away to vote in a new Pope. Together, these gossiping girlies bicker and scheme and connive, dramatically gesturing their way through each voting round in a bid for power and supremacy. The fact this drama comes to us through a bunch of older straight (mostly) white men is neither here nor there.

With a preposterous swish of a religious garment and words hurled like daggers, the catty priests depicted here put Drag Race trio Rolasaktox to shame. Conclave Untucked when? Yet director Edward Berger's latest Oscar bid isn't just the kind of movie that queer people enjoy. It's actually queer for real, or at least reveals itself to be in the last of many gag-worthy twists dotted throughout.

As Cardinal Lawrence (Fiennes) navigates said twists, all under the righteous eye of Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), one dark horse comes to the fore, putting others like Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow) and Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) to shame.

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This particular candidate, Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), wasn't even in the running at first. Secretly appointed by the late pope just before his death, Benitez gradually gains more and more support as the others fight among themselves until a rallying speech about his wartime ministry surprisingly wins him the final vote. And just like that, a new pope is elected, one who no one saw coming.

But before Benitez can don his extremely extra papal hat, Lawrence follows up on an earlier thread and asks him directly why he once made and then cancelled a medical appointment in Switzerland some time before the conclave. Does he have a right to know? Not really. But since when has that stopped a queen like Lawrence getting up in someone's business?

Benitez admits then that he is actually intersex. He found out years earlier when doctors performing surgery on his appendix discovered that he has internal female organs. This subsequent appointment that Lawrence is so curious about was a laparoscopic hysterectomy designed to remove his uterus and ovaries. But Benitez didn't go through with the procedure. In his eyes, removing such an intrinsic part of himself would have been an affront to god.

The former pope took the news surprisingly well, accepting Benitez into the fold, and so too does Lawrence after his initial shock. Moving forward, the Catholic Church will be led by an intersex priest, which is presumably a first for this centuries-old institution. With that, the credits roll, ending Conclave on a surprisingly subversive, but hopeful note that speaks to change in a system all-too-often defined by resistance to progress.

If this all feels a bit left-field, it kind of is. Unless you've read the book that Conclave is based on, you'd have no idea that this was the secret Benitez has been hiding or even that he would be crowned Pope instead of Lawrence. One hint in the original script — an unused razor Lawrence finds in Bentiez's room — was cut because, "It didn’t do anything for me and took away from the character" (as revealed by Berger in Vanity Fair).

As such, it might be tempting to suggest that Conclave's last-minute reveal is a cheap twist that builds on all the messy drama preceding it for mere shock value. There is an unfortunate history of gender reveals being used in cinema to surprise and unsettle audiences, treating trans characters especially as a grotesque punchline. The Crying Game immediately comes to mind, but don't forget the likes of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective or even a film like Trainspotting, which also plays this concept for laughs.

That's not what Conclave is doing though. Because during Benitez’s final conversation with Lawrence, we're never encouraged to laugh or feel revulsion at what's taking place. In fact, being intersex is framed as a strength here.

"I know what it is to exist between the world’s certainties," Benitez explains, and isn't that exactly the kind of Pope that Lawrence has been searching for this whole time? He himself maintained that "Certainty is the enemy of unity and tolerance" in an earlier speech where he outlined the need for change.

If there is an issue with Conclave's twist, it's not the nature of the reveal. It's the journey Benitez takes leading up to it. The script wraps him in a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma and in doing so, it reduces Benitez to a symbol rather than a fully realised character in his own right. The intersex experience is far more complex than his story would have us believe, and given how scarce this kind of representation is, more nuance and depth would have been welcomed.

Yet watching a character openly discuss their intersex identity without shame or embarrassment is still deeply radical and immeasurably important — even before you consider the context of where Benitez is standing and what he's standing for.

As camp as Conclave is from start to finish, the future this ending suggests is infinitely more queer than anything those absolute stunt queens get up to in their fight for power. That's because the power in question now belongs to a Mexican intersex man who sits at the head of an institution that traditionally opposes differences of any kind. The ultimate gag of the (awards) season, you could say.

Conclave is in UK cinemas now.