Conclave: Why ‘Mean Girls with popes’ deserves to win the Oscar for Best Picture

Filled with dramatic popes and nuns backstabbing one another behind closed doors, Edward Berger’s surprisingly spicy thriller – starring Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rossellini – should be rewarded on Hollywood’s biggest night, writes Lydia Spencer-Elliott

Conclave, the papal election drama starring Ralph Fiennes, could’ve easily been as dry as a communion wafer. Yet via a cohort of diva cardinals thirstier for chaos and mess than any cast in The Real Housewives franchise, the film has generated a meme-making online fandom (the self-named Conclave hive) who’ve blessed the movie with a far more appropriate moniker: “Mean Girls for popes”.

Packed with subterfuge, secrecy, backstabbing and division, Conclave – which scooped eight Academy Award nominations across editing, screenplay, design, score and performance categories – asks the question of who actually deserves the inordinate power of being Pope of the Catholic Church. No one hungry enough to want it, it argues. In the hands of director Edward Berger and screenwriter Peter Straughan, who adapted Robert Harris’s novel of the same name, Conclave takes a centuries-old theological tradition and transforms it into a political thriller – without the politicians. It’s for this reason that it should take home the Best Picture Oscar this weekend.

Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (a patient but weary Fiennes) is charged with overseeing the papal conclave to vote for a successor to the recently deceased Pope. In one corner is Cardinal Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), an American liberal who believes in modernising the Church. In the other is the Italian traditionalist (read: racist bigot) Cardinal Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), whose idea of a modern Vatican is one where he can hit his vape in the lunch hall before declaring war on Muslims by 3pm.

Whispers work their way through the walls of the Apostolic Palace with more velocity than a Gossip Girl blog drop. One candidate is outed for having an illicit relationship that led to a son. Another is found guilty of committing simony. Tedesco remains, as does Bellini – who performatively claims he doesn’t want the job. “Is this where we are? Looking for the least worst option?” he asks. It’s a question both US and UK voters asked while tapping their pencils on ballots last year.

For every career-ending secret that’s uttered, there’s just as much conspiratorial near-silence on screen. Chair creaks, cassock rustles and exasperated breaths are all captured by sound editor Ben Baird, while Fiennes and Tucci sit tense, knitting their brows, folding their parchment, and casting their votes with masterful, mute shiftiness. In the absence of speech, the cacophony of diegetic noise amplifies the tension of it all. What can’t be said – niggling doubts, well-founded suspicions, waning loyalties – is just as important as what can.

Straughan’s screenplay centres on the danger of certainty. What is the need for faith if there is no doubt? Why strive for change and progress if we already know everything? Conclave’s plot throws us into this state of unknowing by being so relentlessly high-camp and hectic that every time you think you know where the story is going, you’re three paces behind – and standing in the wrong direction.

Cardinal Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who shows up minutes before the college is officially sequestered claiming he was made cardinal “in pectore” by the late Pope, harbours the biggest secret. His presence builds to the film’s whiplash-inducing conclusion, which many Catholics have called blasphemous.

Ralph Fiennes in ‘Conclave’ (Philippe Antonello/Focus Features)

Other critics have claimed that Conclave’s final plot twist was deployed as a “gotcha” gimmick, rather than to provoke reflection or discussion. It’s a mic-drop of an ending, sure, which comes so close to the credits it leaves audiences almost no time to reflect on what they’ve just learned. But this briskness only means we take Conclave’s philosophical quandary out into the world with us.

“Not everyone needs to agree with the movie,” Berger told Vanity Fair last October. “I love when people disagree and we can have an argument about it, a real lively discussion. This is what Benitez is about – bringing people together, furthering discussion, and not squashing it,” he added of the debate that has followed the film.

Classic storytelling, a formidable cast and an aptly jittery score all contribute to making Conclave a worthy Best Picture contender. Yet, nobody took its odds seriously until it picked up Best Film at the Bafta awards earlier this month. With the real Pope Francis remaining in critical condition with early kidney failure, Conclave has become all the more uncannily prophetic; but the film was always bizarrely relatable, with or without chaos in the Vatican. Power-hungry leaders are everywhere, they’re just wearing different robes.