Conclave turns an election with no cameras, no campaign ads, and no public candidates into one of the tensest thrillers of the year, which is a genuine trick of screenwriting — Peter Straughan's script treats procedure itself as suspense, letting robes, ballots, and whispered Latin carry the same dread other films reserve for gunfights. Edward Berger, coming off All Quiet on the Western Front, shoots the Sistine Chapel set with the same cold formal symmetry he brought to trench warfare, which tells you exactly how he wants you to read the politics happening inside it. This is a movie about institutional power that never raises its voice.
Ralph Fiennes anchors it as Cardinal Lawrence, a man who wanted no part of running this process and grows more disillusioned with every secret he's forced to uncover about the men vying to lead the Church. Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Sergio Castellitto play the leading papal contenders as men people actually recognize — the reformer, the operator, the reactionary — without tipping into caricature. Isabella Rossellini has one of the year's best single scenes as Sister Agnes, delivering a quietly devastating rebuke in a handful of lines after staying silent for most of the runtime.
The most dangerous room in the world has no weapons in it.
The Vatican doesn't allow filming inside the real Sistine Chapel, so the production found and refurbished an old chapel set in storage over just ten weeks at Rome's Cinecittà Studios, while the sweeping papal corridors were shot at the Royal Palace of Caserta near Naples. Fiennes has said simply wearing the cardinal's robes on that rebuilt set changed how he moved and carried himself in scenes. The Robert Harris novel the film is based on was researched with real access to Vatican protocol experts, part of why the procedural details feel credible rather than invented for drama.
Conclave scored 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and 79 on Metacritic, and went on to eight Oscar nominations, winning Best Adapted Screenplay. For a film built almost entirely around men in rooms discussing procedure, it became a genuine audience hit relative to its scale, helped by word-of-mouth around its late twist. It's also had an odd afterlife as a real-world reference point — reports surfaced of actual cardinals watching it to prepare for a real papal conclave, about as strong an endorsement of its authenticity as a prestige drama could hope for.
Conclave's commercial performance ended up matching its awards momentum: the film grossed roughly $128 million worldwide against a reported $20 million budget, an unusually strong return for a dialogue-driven drama about Vatican procedure with no major action set pieces to sell in a trailer. Berger has said he was able to assemble a cast of this caliber partly by trading on the awards momentum from All Quiet on the Western Front, using that film's Oscar wins as leverage to bring Fiennes, Tucci, Lithgow, and Rossellini on board for a project built almost entirely around men in rooms talking. The film had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on August 30, 2024, nearly two months before its wide theatrical release, giving critics an early runway to build the word-of-mouth that helped carry it into awards season.
