The 2024 film Conclave, which follows the drama of a fictional papal election, was broadly praised for its excellent cast, luxurious visuals, atmosphere of intrigue, and suspenseful storytelling. Peter Straughan’s multilingual screenplay even won an Academy Award. I admired all those virtues, but it was the final plot twist that kept me thinking about Conclave for days. This is your warning: if you haven’t seen Conclave yet, stop reading now and come back when you’re finished!
Given the film’s genre—Variety described it as a “thinking man’s thriller”—I was expecting a last-minute act of sabotage, or a heel turn by a character who seemed heroic. But when the soft-spoken Cardinal Benitez, having just accepted his election as supreme pontiff, revealed to Ralph Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence that he was an intersex person, the movie seemed to change keys entirely. A subject the film had only glancingly considered—sex and gender in the Church—was suddenly its most central point of conflict. What form that conflict might take, or what new growth might come from it, is left to the audience’s imagination. We don’t even see the new pope in his vestments: as Lawrence adjusts to the news, the blinds of sequester lift, sunlight returns to the cardinals’ residence, and the credits roll.
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