Pick a pope? Tread carefully. Robert Harris’s 2016 thriller Conclave whisked us inside the Sistine Chapel to eavesdrop on the hushed, cloistered, and backstabbing process of casting ballots for the papal succession. It can take days. Once, in 1268, it took 33 months.
The contemporary election Harris cooked up isn’t quite that complex, but it’s still a dank labyrinth of intrigue – with schemes being hatched, skeletons rattling in closets, and one man trying to peer through the murk to the outcome that won’t set Catholicism back decades.
A redoubtable Ralph Fiennes plays the hero (renamed Cardinal Thomas Lawrence here) and is very much the best thing in this film directed by All Quiet on the Western Front’s Edward Berger. He’s buttoned down without looking fit to burst. Pained. Grey. Tasked with organising the election, he listens intently, weighing each nugget of intel. A cautious pragmatist, he’s Rome’s present-day answer to Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall, only with less personal ambition.
His favoured choice to take over from the late pope, who has died of a sudden heart attack, is the liberal reformer Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), who claims, perhaps disingenuously, to have no desire to step forward. Pitted against him are the blatantly ambitious Tremblay (a supercilious John Lithgow), the ultra-conservative Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto, evilly vaping to show he’s a bad egg) and the initial frontrunner Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), who is none too accepting of women or homosexuals.
It’s rather guessable which tortoise has been planted here to win the race, even if the plot does have an additional twist in store – one that equates to blowing a raspberry, rather than engaging seriously with a hot-button issue.