Based on a bestselling novel by Robert Harris, the Oscar-tipped film imagines what goes on behind the scenes of the secretive process – complete with scheming, smearing and leaking. As rival factions of cardinals manoeuvre to elect the next pope, the US Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci) rejects a suggestion that he use stolen documents to smear a rival. His decision is not entirely on moral grounds.
"I'd be the Richard Nixon of popes," he says, in a scene that captures the savvy plot, the wit and the colourful characters in Conclave. The film takes us behind the scenes of the secretive, ritualised process that happens in the Vatican after a pope dies, but it plays like a bracing, contemporary political thriller. Edward Berger, whose All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) won the Oscar for best international film, directs with great precision and fidelity to real-life conclaves, capturing an essential conflict: this ancient ritual now lands in the media-flooded 21st Century.
That link between ancient and modern actually inspired Robert Harris's bestselling 2016 novel of the same name, the basis for the film. Harris tells the BBC that the idea came to him in 2013 while, in the midst of finishing his Cicero Trilogy of novels set in ancient Rome, he was watching news of the election of Pope Francis. Harris says: "Just before the [new] Pope reveals himself on the balcony, the windows on either side fill up with the faces of the cardinal electors who've come to watch him.
I looked .
