CARDINAL SINS

The twisty, Oscar-tipped Conclave’ needed more than shock and awe, writes Clarisse Loughrey, while the beautiful loneliness of All We Imagine as Light’ will speak to your soul

-  Clarisse Loughrey

If Conclave can be reduced to a single image, it’s undoubtedly that of a cardinal taking a hit from his vape. We’re in the most hallowed spaces of the Vatican here, implanted within private practices the vast majority of the film’s audience are never meant to see (although, really, these are all sound stages in Rome’s Cinecittà Studios). Yet director Edward Berger allows us to peer in, like children planted at the doorway, to giggle at how pedestrian and mortally flawed it all is beneath the gilded finery and incense.

Cardinals scroll on their phones. Cardinals slurp up bowls of tortellini soup. Cardinals have conversations about the future of the Catholic Church next to the espresso machine. Conclave turns ritual into the hysteria of a murder mystery, the tension of a political conspiracy, the pressurised force of a criminal heist.

When we first meet Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), chosen to oversee the papal conclave to elect a successor to the (very) recently deceased Pope, he puts his red skullcap on as if he were rolling down a balaclava outside the doors of a city bank.

Berger, whose skill in setting tone and atmosphere was already apparent in his Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), adapts Robert Harris’s 2016 novel in a way that’s so taut and controlled that it’s near-impossible not to be drawn in. Cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine’s manipulation of shadow gives the film poise and beauty, with all players perfectly arranged within any given shot. Whenever composer Volker Bertelmann’s sparse but methodical score kicks in, it’s as if someone’s suddenly fired a gun.