Conclave — The Paperwork Is Holy

Edward Berger made a papal thriller that plays like the most consequential office drama ever filmed — a movie about choosing a leader inside a locked room, where faith turns out to mean counting the ballots honestly. It is gripping right up until the moment it loses its nerve.

Conclave is a workplace thriller, and the workplace is the Sistine Chapel. A pope has died, the cardinals of the world fly in to lock themselves away and choose his successor, and Edward Berger shoots the whole sacred process like the highest-stakes office meeting in Christendom — conducted in Latin, decided by fire, run by a man with a clipboard who would very much like to go home. That man is Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, and the film is smart enough to know that the most interesting person in any institution is never the one chasing the top job. It is the one stuck administering the contest for it.

The thesis arrives early, in a homily, and the film spends the next two hours watching the room ignore it. Lawrence stands before the cardinals and tells them that certainty is the enemy, that doubt is the sister of faith, that the Church needs a pope who doubts. Half the men in that chapel hear doctrine. The other half hear a coded endorsement of someone specific, and start counting heads. That gap — between what the homily means and how the conclave hears it — is the whole movie. Berger is filming the moment faith becomes procedure, conviction becomes a vote tally, and a sacred calling turns into the same horse-trading that decides anything run by human beings in a closed room.

And he shoots it with a control that keeps the paperwork genuinely thrilling. Berger builds the conclave out of boxes — the dining hall, the dormitory, the chapel — each a rectangle with a single door, and the door is always a decision. Stephane Fontaine’s camera holds the cardinals in symmetrical, altarpiece compositions, then quietly slides them off-center as the counts drift, so you can read the political weather off the frame before anyone opens their mouth. The film treats ballot-counting the way a heist treats a vault: it doesn’t show you the math, it shows you the faces waiting on the math. Volker Bertelmann’s score holds its fire until a count actually moves, then drops in like a ruling. Nothing here romanticizes the Church. The cardinals surrender their phones into a wooden tray. The dormitory looks like a mid-tier airport hotel with nicer silver. This is a large organization with a human-resources problem, and the resources are made of men.

Fiennes is doing something quietly enormous: playing exhaustion as a full performance. His Lawrence enters every room a half-second after he should, shoulders already bent under a job that hasn’t officially started, and the whole character lives in that weariness — a man of faith who has been a bureaucrat long enough to dread what he suspects the count will turn up. Around him the bench is loaded. Stanley Tucci is the reasonable liberal who can’t quite admit he wants it. John Lithgow smiles at precisely the wrong moments. Isabella Rossellini, handed only a few scenes as a nun, understands exactly what a file does in the right hands. Nobody in this cast is playing a saint. They are playing colleagues, which is worse, and a great deal more fun to watch.

Here is the one real knock, and it earns the name. For two hours Conclave is a superb secular machine, a process drama whose pleasures are entirely procedural — who voted, who withdrew, who got cornered in a hallway. And then, at the very end, it flinches. It reaches for a final revelation that swaps the political argument for a different kind of one, a twist that wants to land as parable. I won’t spoil where it goes. I’ll only say the film spent its whole runtime earning a secular ending — the last door closing on a vote — and instead reaches past what it built for a symbol it never quite set up. The seam shows. To be fair, it is honoring the novel underneath it, and if you came for the parable you’ll be fed. I just wanted it to trust its own genre long enough to end on the ballots.

Even with the flinch, this is the rare studio thriller that knows its own machine is enough — that watching a bureaucracy try to choose a moral leader is itself a moral act. The bad coffee, the back-channel notes, the way a pope gets elected in the same kind of room a corporate board would use if the board wore more scarlet: Berger gets the texture of institutional life exactly right, and Fiennes holds a chord of doubt the film itself can’t hold quite as long. Faith, in Conclave, is the willingness to count the ballots honestly. It is a thriller about paperwork, and the paperwork is holy. When it believes that, it is extraordinary. It only stumbles when it stops.

LUNARA DEBRIEF

• Score: 4 / 5
• Year: 2024
• Where to Watch: Theatrical (Focus Features) | VOD / Peacock
• Theme Echo: Doubt (2008) tt0918927. Certainty versus doubt inside the same Catholic institution — the argument Lawrence’s homily makes, given a whole film of its own.
• Counter-Program: The Two Popes (2019) tt8404614. The warm, humane two-hander on papal succession; the exact tonal inverse of Berger’s chilly proceduralism.
• Career Context: All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) tt1016150. Berger’s prior film, the institutional machine grinding the individual; Conclave turns that same eye from the war machine to the church machine.