By Peter Keough

Calling out papal bull in the twisty, provocative, and subversive Conclave.

Conclave, directed by John Berger, based on the novel by Robert Harris. Opening at the Boston Common and in the suburbs on October 25.

Ralph Fiennes in Conclave.

As we wait anxiously for the upcoming Presidential election, John Berger’s Conclave, a twisty, provocative, and subversive thriller about a fictitious but no less stressful and consequential contest, serves as a welcome diversion.

Based on the 2016 Thomas Harris page-turner of the same title (in books on similar subjects it ranks in literary quality, if not plausibility, somewhere between Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons and Frederick Rolfe’s Hadrian the Seventh), the story opens with the death of an unnamed pope not unlike the current pontiff. Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the dean of the College of Cardinals and the late patriarch’s close friend, is in charge of organizing the Papal Conclave to elect a successor. It’s an emotionally taxing, thankless duty made more difficult by the bitter divisions within the Church and the ambitions of ideologically opposed cardinals vying to fill the position.

Among the contenders is Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), Lawrence’s colleague and a progressive committed to continuing the prior pope’s reforms. He is regarded by most as the frontrunner. But Bellini has doubts about his fitness for the job and is far less ruthless than his rivals, the arch conservative Cardinal Tedesco of Venice (a delightfully repugnant Sergio Castellitto), the charismatic but even more conservative Cardinal Adeyemi of Nigeria (Lucian Msamati), and the lubriciously glad-handing centrist Cardinal Tremblay of Canada (John Lithgow).

Adding to the volatile mix is an unexpected arrival, Cardinal Benítez (newcomer Carlos Diehz, whose performance captures the elusive quality of innate saintliness) of Kabul by way of Mexico. Coming from impoverished origins, he has made a career of helping the downtrodden in various hot spots in the world. Appointed in pectore (“in the heart,” or kept secret for various reasons, safety not the least) as one of the late pope’s last acts, he is an unknown quantity whose genuine spirituality and detachment from the lure of power serves as a contrast to the worldliness and limitations of the others.

The conclave begins, and Berger, following Harris’s lead, lingers over some of the rituals and regalia of the process. The cardinals are sequestered in a drab dormitory and vote in the Sistine Chapel (reconstructed at Cinecittà Studios), which has been sealed up (seals and their breaking are a motif in the film) to eliminate distractions from outside. Despite that, the rumblings of demonstrations out in the city disturb the tedious, though nerdily suspenseful, vote-counting, which for me brought back warm memories of similar tabulations in various critics societies’ end-of-year awards meetings. Ominously, the traditional smoke of the burning ballots at the end of each session (black for no decision, white for Habemus papam) is matched by smoke rising from sources unknown.

But even the most rigorous dedication to isolation can’t keep out the secrets of the past. Cardinal Lawrence has his hands full dealing with the daily revelations. He is tortured as to how much to disclose and his own motives for doing so. Meanwhile, the growing pressure forces some of the candidates to involuntarily reveal their own base nature – in one telling scene, Todesco relates his noxious hatreds for Muslims, liberals, immigrants, and the like: he hopes to return the Church to its glory days. One particular gesture resembles that of a certain Presidential candidate at his worst.

As a member of the conclave points out, these are petty, power-hungry, feckless men. And they are all men – the sole woman with a speaking part is Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), who is in charge of the nuns who meekly serve the prelates. She delivers a devastating rebuke to one of them, signing off with perhaps the most ego-crushing curtsy in cinema.

Berger has toned down the CGI excesses and bombast of his Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front and relied instead on his cast’s nuanced performances and the subdued, sometimes sublime imagery offered by the setting. A shot of the cardinals – dressed in black robes trimmed with red and bearing identical white umbrellas – marching across an ancient, whitened square subtly evokes the allure and regimentation of two thousand years of the world’s most adamantly patriarchal institution. More importantly, Berger deftly orchestrates the story’s ultimate twist, which is an utter subversion of that patriarchal reign.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).