Oscar hopes are soaring for Conclave, a film that asks “What if an episode of Gossip Girl was set at the Vatican?” A strong box office this past weekend only increased the award-season attention put on the film, a delightful mashup of Real Housewives and The Da Vinci Code. Ralph Fiennes may now be our Best Actor frontrunner for his role as Olivia Pope in a beautiful red cassock.
To be clear, snarky as it may read, all of the above is an endorsement. Conclave is a prestige film that will resonate with a mainstream audience, but is appealingly juicy, verging on a soap opera, in a silly way that it may or may not actually realize.
As such, anyone who has seen the film is buzzing, as fervently as those tea-spilling priests in the film, especially about the ending.
Based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, the film centers around Fiennes’ Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, who is in charge of the papal conclave to select a new pope following the serving one’s death.
The wheeling-and-dealing in stairwells and shadowy hallway corners more closely resemble an episode of Succession than some of us might like to know, as the cardinals in attendance campaign, scheme, and attempt to wrangle enough votes for their so-called candidate to be the next Holy Leader. Everything is upended, however, by the arrival of a cardinal who had been, under the previous pope, working in secret for their own safety in dangerous regions of the world. Suddenly, everyone’s calculations about how the conclave could or should go are thrown off.
(Warning: Major spoilers ahead.)
It’s best to go into Conclave not knowing what is going to happen, because it has one of the most WAIT…WHAT?!?! twists in recent memory. We’re about to talk about that reveal, so do not read further if you want to remain unspoiled.
Throughout the film, the high-ranking members of the conclave are trying to figure out what the whole deal is with Cardinal Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz), the surprise guest. They go so far as to get background checks about him, revealing mysterious doctor’s appointments that were made through the Vatican that he never attended.
When the toxic political agendas of the other cardinals reach a combustion point, however, Benitez intervenes with a speech so pure and centering that the conclave inevitably votes them to be the new pope.
It is after this happens that Cardinal Lawrence receives one last, vital piece of information from all of those Benitez background checks: the surgery that was booked for Benitez was for a hysterectomy. Benitez is intersex, and was assigned male at birth. He has a penis, a uterus, and ovaries. “I am as God me,” Benitez tells Lawrence when confronted.
It’s an explosive confrontation to the film’s audience. Forget how you feel about the Catholic Church and its stance on women in the cloth. How do you view gender identity? The conclave had just, depending, on your stance on the issue, selected a pope that some would call biologically female.
There are film critics who have their issue with the whiplash of this twist. And, naturally, there are Catholics who are not pleased…particularly with the resolution to the film, which is that Lawrence decides to keep this information private. Benitez is the new pope.
There is the intense reaction you would expect. “Don’t Watch This Movie! The Controversy Surrounding ‘Conclave’ for Catholic Viewers” is a top YouTube hit for the film, with the account behind it having 47,300 subscribers. Ben Shapiro’s YouTube screed to his 7 million subscribers is more blunt about it: “Catholics Should Be P---ed About This Movie.”
There’s even an entire Reddit thread titled, “Conclave, is it OK to watch?” The prompt: “I don’t want to watch movies that are anti-Catholic. But interested in the movie Conclave. Is this ok to watch as a practicing Catholic?”
Back on Earth, away from the extremely online, however, the reaction from Catholic critics has been more nuanced than at least I, a lapsed practitioner, would expect.
“A serious, even lugubrious, tone and a top-flight cast add heft to the ecclesiastical melodrama Conclave,” says the review that ran in the Catholic Review. “Yet the film is fundamentally a power-struggle potboiler kept roiling by attention-grabbing plot developments — the last and most significant of which Catholic viewers will likely find uncomfortable at best.”
About that ending, the review had spicier thoughts: “Not only professors of dogmatic theology but all moviegoers committed to the church’s creeds will, accordingly, want to approach this earnest, visually engaging but manipulative—and sometimes sensationalist — production with caution. The ideological smoke it sends up remains persistently gray.”
Catholic news site Angelus was less measured in its review, mixing its outrage over the plot with its judgment of the film’s overall quality. “Anti-Catholic bias aside, Conclave is just plain bad,” the headline reads. Its assessment of what it calls the “completely gratuitous” plot twist: “The film has been poking fun at the expense of these corrupt, moronic cardinals. It turns out that God is playing jokes at their expense as well: the savior of the church of men is in fact a biological woman.”
For its part, Twitter/X/whatever you call the site that siphons my sanity, has been having its own fun with the pulpy nature of the film about a topic one would expect to be shrouded in over-seriousness.
