Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.What happens next? In movies, the answer comes from a scriptwriter. In life, it is offered by religion. Put the two together and you get Conclave, an expertly juicy drama of Catholicism and guilt, built on that loaded question and a crackerjack performance from Ralph Fiennes. The setting is the Vatican, the scene the death of a fictional pope, and even with the body still in situ, minds turn to succession. Of course. The job is among the biggest on Earth, but a further promotion has been achieved. “He is with God,” someone observes. Filling the vacancy becomes the heart of a film about spiritual communion, and a long night at the office.Much of the workload falls to Fiennes as Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence, loyal right hand to the late pontiff. “Some are chosen to be shepherds,” the boss once told him, “and some to manage the farm.” A million corporate heads of department will feel instantly seen. And so Lawrence greets the clergy soon arrived in Rome to elect the new pope. Adapting Robert Harris’s bestseller, the movie finds a groove of high-end professionalism. The casting department is particularly overachieving. You realise that, somewhere in your mind’s eye, you have always imagined Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow as regal cardinals, more or less exactly as they both turn up among contenders for the throne.What next echoes through the movie: whodunnit less so, at least the way you might expect. With the cast confined together, the movie has the tingle of a murder mystery, but the foul play only really starts once the body has been found. Cue suspicion, skulduggery and a jostle for votes, barely restrained by the endlessly decent Lawrence. Amid the electoral maths, politics is foregrounded. The initial drama is the attempt to stop an arch-conservative returning the church to a harsher past.Director Edward Berger last made 2022’s multiple Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front. That film evoked the cacophony of war. Here the soundtrack is the backstairs whisper, the result the kind of old-school page-turner-on-screen now seldom seen in cinemas. The tone is wry, the plot sturdy, the main course a thick porterhouse slab of grass-fed, richly marbled acting, delivered to your seat.Much of the appeal of Conclave is the promise of showing us something like the real Vatican, the charm how humdrum that can be. Beyond devotion and ambition, the everyday is everywhere. Cigarette breaks are snatched; workmen shin up ladders in the Sistine Chapel. Berger gently dials up the comedy. One scene is stolen by a coffee machine, another by a photocopier. As the papal housekeeper, Isabella Rossellini has at least one grandly droll moment. We are reminded that, however holy their task, no one here is anything but human.If that sounds a little soft-centred, well. Published in 2016, Harris’s novel was written at a different time for consensus liberal values. Audiences of all stripes may now find the Obama-ish mood suggests a period piece. Polite agnosticism is the order of the day. But the film does say that serving God and the church are not quite the same thing — and a good soul like Lawrence may have to question his faith in both. You see the doubt in the worry lines creasing Fiennes’s big-screen forehead — uncertainty made flesh in a film where all things end, but only some endure.★★★★☆In US cinemas now and in UK cinemas from November 29
