Conclave

dir. Edward Berger · 2024

Snapshot

A tightly wound ecclesiastical thriller set entirely within the Vatican's sequestered conclave proceedings, Conclave follows Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), Dean of the College of Cardinals, as he shepherds a fractious papal election toward a conclusion while navigating blackmail, forgery, hidden identities, and his own corrosive private doubt. Adapted from Robert Harris's 2016 novel by screenwriter Peter Straughan and shot largely at Cinecittà studios in Rome, the film operates as a study in institutional anxiety: how ancient bureaucracies encode power, how men of God reason through ambition, and how secrecy becomes both the Church's greatest weapon and its deepest wound. Released in the United States by Focus Features in October 2024, Conclave earned wide critical praise and entered the 2024–25 awards season as a significant contender, garnering multiple Academy Award nominations including Best Picture.

Industry & production

Conclave is a UK–US co-production, developed by Film4 and Black Bear Pictures and distributed theatrically by Focus Features in North America and by Universal Pictures internationally. Edward Berger came to the project off the extraordinary success of All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), his German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel that won four Academy Awards including Best International Feature Film — a performance that gave Berger genuine leverage to mount an English-language prestige production at scale.

Robert Harris's novel had circulated in Hollywood for several years before Straughan's involvement. Harris, whose fiction frequently inhabits the corridors of institutional power — the Roman Senate in Imperium, MI6 in The Secret Service — provided a text already structured like a procedural mystery, with the conclave's rigid rules functioning as both plot engine and symbolic architecture. Straughan, whose screenwriting credits include Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), brought to the adaptation the same patience for bureaucratic texture and slow-building menace he had demonstrated with le Carré.

Shooting in the actual Vatican was not possible; the Church does not grant access for dramatic productions of this kind. Production designer — the specific credit should be verified against production records — reconstructed the Sistine Chapel, the Domus Sanctae Marthae, and the relevant corridors at Cinecittà, Rome's historic studio complex that has hosted everything from Fellini's productions to recent prestige television. The choice of Cinecittà was not merely practical: it placed the film within a lineage of Vatican-adjacent productions that includes Roma (1972) and The Young Pope (2016), and the studio's infrastructure is calibrated for large-scale period interiors.

The ensemble — Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini, Sergio Castellitto, and Carlos Diehm — was assembled with unusual care for tonal cohesion. Each major cardinal is engineered to represent a different axis of Church politics (conservative, progressive, African, North American), and the casting calibrates that ideological range through performers whose screen personas already carry corresponding weight.

Technology

Conclave was shot on film — a choice that meaningfully inflects the film's visual register. Cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine, working in collaboration with Berger, selected film stocks that emphasize granular texture and a slightly desaturated warmth, giving the ancient interiors an organic, pre-digital density that video or modern digital sensors would resist. The commitment to photochemical acquisition aligned with the film's broader commitment to tactile, material craft: the frescoes, cassocks, and stonework register with a solidity that digital clarity can ironically undermine.

The Sistine Chapel reconstruction required careful lighting design to approximate the quality of natural light filtered through the chapel's high windows — a controlled imitation of the uncontrollable, which suits the film's thematic concerns. Fontaine and the production team reportedly spent considerable preparation time studying the architectural light patterns of the actual space, though the precise technical documentation of this process had not entered the public scholarly record at the time of writing.

Sound recording in large stone-floored, hard-surfaced rooms presents distinctive challenges. The production's sound design — which leans into the reverberant, echo-laden acoustics of Vatican architecture — appears to have balanced location-style ambient capture with controlled studio recording. The film's sonic world is one of its subtler achievements.

Technique

Cinematography

Stéphane Fontaine, known primarily for his collaborations with Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, 2009; Rust and Bone, 2012) and his work on Pablo Larraín's Jackie (2016), brings to Conclave a visual grammar rooted in psychological interiority. His characteristic tool is the close-up deployed at moments of internal pressure — not the classical Hollywood close-up that registers a single emotion, but a searching, slightly uncomfortable proximity that holds the face as a contested surface, readable in competing ways simultaneously.

The film is notable for its controlled use of deep-focus compositions within large architectural spaces, alternating between the vertiginous grandeur of fresco-covered ceilings and the claustrophobic compression of dormitory corridors and antechambers. Color is held to a narrow, ecclesiastically appropriate palette — crimsons, blacks, gold, the flat white of ballot papers — and the film rarely introduces a hue that does not have doctrinal weight.

Camera movement is restrained, largely avoiding the kinetic urgency that marks contemporary thriller cinematography. When the camera does move — tracking slowly through a deliberating group, or drifting across the chapel floor — it does so with the unhurried gravity of institutional ritual, as though the camera itself has taken vows.

Editing

Editor Nick Emerson, who collaborated with Berger on All Quiet on the Western Front, constructs Conclave around the rhythms of deliberation rather than action. Cuts are often held longer than genre convention would demand; scenes breathe and accumulate rather than accelerate. The formal patience mirrors the conclave's own temporal structure — ballots, tally-marks, the burning of papers, the smoke signal — and produces a thriller whose tension is architectural rather than kinetic.

The editing of group scenes, particularly the Cardinals' formal sessions, is notably precise in its management of spatial geography: the viewer always knows where power sits in a room and where the camera's sympathies lie, without the film ever making that geometry explicit.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Berger stages Conclave as a theatre of body language and proxemics. Cardinals' allegiances shift through how men position themselves in corridors, who they speak to across the refectory, which way they turn in a doorway. The Sistine Chapel balloting sequences, staged in rows facing the altar, impose a medieval spatial order on contemporary political calculation, and Berger exploits the ironized formality of men in liturgical costume engaged in what is effectively a political convention.

Spatial architecture is thematic: the permissiveness of certain rooms (the garden where cardinals speak privately) against the formal surveillance of others (the Chapel, the sessions) structures the film's moral geography. Privacy is always a negotiated exception within the conclave's total enclosure.

Sound

The score, by Volker Bertelmann (performing as Hauschka), sustains the chamber-music restraint he brought to All Quiet on the Western Front, for which he shared the Academy Award for Best Original Score. Bertelmann works largely in strings and sparse orchestration, with minimalist patterns that accumulate harmonic tension without resolving it — an appropriate formal analogue to the film's story of institutional procedures that defer and defer judgment. Gregorian-adjacent choral elements appear selectively and are never used cheaply.

The ambient sound design deserves equal credit: the creak of stone floors, the rustle of cassocks, the muffled sound of Rome beyond the enclosure walls. Silence is deployed strategically, and the periodic absence of score produces some of the film's most uncomfortable moments.

Performance

Ralph Fiennes delivers a performance of sustained interior weather. Cardinal Lawrence is a man afflicted by doubt — a condition the film presents as simultaneously disqualifying (he has confessed it) and uniquely qualifying (it makes him honest) — and Fiennes builds this from habitual stillness interrupted by moments of uncontrolled feeling. The performance's precision is in its economy: Lawrence's distress is registered in jaw tension, in the pace at which he moves through rooms, in the micro-expressions that cross a face trained by decades of hierarchical discipline to reveal nothing.

Stanley Tucci (Cardinal Bellini), John Lithgow (Cardinal Tremblay), and Sergio Castellitto (Cardinal Tedesco) each anchor a distinct ideological position within the conclave while avoiding schematic reduction. Isabella Rossellini's Sister Agnes is among the film's finest creations — a figure who operates entirely outside the all-male electoral machinery and is therefore, the film implies, the only person fully capable of seeing it clearly.

Narrative & dramatic mode

Conclave is a procedural mystery organized around an election. Harris's novel structures its revelations as a series of escalating disclosures — each ballot surfacing a new secret — and Straughan's adaptation preserves this nested-revelation architecture while tightening the psychological focalization through Lawrence. The mode is what might be called the parliamentary thriller: power is exercised through procedure, and drama inheres in the violation or manipulation of rules rather than in physical action.

The film's third-act revelation — concerning Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehm) and his intersex identity — functions both as plot twist and as doctrinal disruption, posing the question of whether the Church's categories of gender are adequate to the actual range of human being. Harris embedded this device in his novel with deliberate theological seriousness, and Berger and Straughan treat it with corresponding care rather than as shock material.

Genre & cycle

Conclave belongs to a recognizable cycle of prestige institutional thrillers — films that locate conspiracy within hierarchies whose authority derives from tradition, secrecy, or specialized knowledge. The immediate antecedents include Costa-Gavras's European political films (Z, 1969; The Confession, 1970), Sidney Lumet's procedural dramas, and the American paranoid thrillers of the 1970s. More specifically, Vatican-set drama has its own small lineage: Michael Anderson's The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), which similarly depicted a papal election, and Paolo Sorrentino's television series The Young Pope (2016) and The New Pope (2020), which occupied adjacent satirical and surrealist terrain.

The film also participates in the early twenty-first century revival of the adult prestige literary adaptation — films like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Hossein Amini's The Two Faces of January (2014), and other productions that resist both franchise logic and arthouse minimalism in favor of a crafted, character-driven middle register.

Authorship & method

Edward Berger works from literary source material with consistent curatorial instinct: his two most significant features, All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave, are both adaptations of canonical novels, and both are distinguished by the rigor with which they subordinate cinematic spectacle to psychological and moral argument. Berger is not an action filmmaker using period or institutional settings as backdrop; he is a director for whom setting is argument, and whose camera observes its subjects with a certain sober German-inflected realism even when the material is operatic.

His collaboration with Stéphane Fontaine — replacing Berger's German-language cinematographer James Friend — reflects a deliberate internationalization of his filmmaking practice. Fontaine's fluency in the slow-burn, psychologically saturated European mode maps onto Berger's own sensibilities without friction.

Peter Straughan's contribution is foundational. His gift — developed in adaptations of le Carré and, before that, in the dark-comedy register of Tinker Tailor — is for sustaining moral complexity within genre structure, for screenplays that do not resolve into simple judgments even as they arrive at definitive plot conclusions.

Volker Bertelmann's sustained collaboration with Berger across two major productions constitutes a genuine creative partnership: the composer's post-minimalist austerity has become part of the Berger signature.

Movement / national cinema

Conclave occupies a productive ambiguity in terms of national cinema. Berger is German; the source novel is British; the financing is Anglo-American; the setting is entirely Roman; the cast is multinational. The film gravitates toward European art-cinema values — pacing, moral seriousness, performance style, resistance to narrative catharsis — while operating entirely within the infrastructure and commercial register of English-language prestige production.

This position reflects a structural condition of contemporary European filmmakers who achieve international recognition: the industrial pull of English-language production is met by a formal investment, at the level of cinematography and editing, that carries the discipline of European film schools and festival culture. Conclave is in this sense legible within British prestige production (via Film4) as well as within the emergent profile of a German director whose ambitions exceed the national language.

Era / period

Conclave is simultaneously contemporary and deliberately atemporal. The action takes place in modern Rome — mobile phones must be surrendered, the conclave is tracked by the global media outside the walls — but the visual and procedural world of the film is medieval. This temporal doubling is the film's governing irony: an institution that has preserved its forms across centuries attempting to govern itself, through those same forms, in the present.

The film is of its cultural moment in its interest in the gap between institutional self-presentation and institutional reality — a concern that runs across the prestige television and film of the 2010s and 2020s, from The Crown to Succession to Oppenheimer. The Catholic Church's particular crisis of authority (child abuse scandals, questions of doctrinal modernization, the politics of the Francis papacy) provides an implicit context that the film does not explicitly invoke but that any 2024 viewer carries in.

Themes

At its center, Conclave is a film about doubt as a moral condition. Cardinal Lawrence's private confession that he no longer knows what he believes is presented not as disqualification but as the only honest theological position available to an intelligent modern believer. The film argues — carefully and without didacticism — that certainty, in men of institutional power, is the most dangerous quality of all.

Adjacent themes include: the corruption that accrues to all large institutions regardless of their spiritual mandate; the structural exclusion of women from Catholic governance (Sister Agnes's perspective punctures the Cardinals' self-seriousness at precisely calibrated moments); the way identity categories (doctrinal, gendered, national) are instruments of power before they are descriptions of persons; and the cyclical, self-perpetuating nature of hierarchies that select their own successors.

The ballot papers — white until decision, burned after each inconclusive vote — are the film's governing image: the secrecy that makes the process sacred also makes it ungovernable, and the smoke that rises from the Vatican chimney to signal election or failure is legible to the world only as binary, concealing everything that produced it.

Reception, canon & influence

Conclave was received with consistent critical admiration upon its premiere and wide release in autumn 2024. Critics cited the film's formal discipline, Fiennes's performance, and Berger's capacity to sustain tension through procedure rather than action. It earned Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (Straughan), Best Film Editing (Emerson), and Best Costume Design (Lisy Christl), among others. Peter Straughan won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, a recognition that ratified the film's status as a major literary adaptation.

Looking backward: the film draws on the tradition of European political cinema, particularly the Costa-Gavras mode of institutional conspiracy; on the 1970s American paranoid thriller; and on Harris's own acknowledged debt to Graham Greene's Catholic moral fiction — a lineage that runs from The Power and the Glory through The Third Man to Harris's procedural intelligence. The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) is the most direct filmic antecedent for the papal-election narrative, though Harris's and Berger's treatments are structurally and tonally distinct. The influence of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is discernible in Straughan's approach to bureaucratic loyalty and betrayal.

Looking forward: Conclave's legacy is still forming at the time of writing. Its most probable influence is as a model for English-language prestige adaptations of institutional fiction — demonstrating that an adult, formally rigorous, non-franchise film can succeed critically and commercially if given sufficient craft investment and a strong ensemble. Berger's emergence as a major English-language director of European sensibility — comparable in trajectory to figures like Wolfgang Petersen or Roland Emmerich, though in an entirely different register — makes Conclave a significant career document. Whether the film will enter the established canon of Vatican cinema or of the political thriller genre depends on how subsequent films and scholars position it; the critical consensus of the immediate reception strongly suggests it will endure.