A serious, even lugubrious, tone and a top-flight cast add heft to the ecclesiastical melodrama Conclave (Focus). 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, and which has already drawn the ire of some.

The story centres on Ralph Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence. In the wake of the sudden death of a fictional, unnamed pope (Bruno Novelli), it’s Lawrence’s duty — as dean of the college of cardinals — to organize the gathering of the title.

A trio of leading candidates for the papacy quickly emerges as down-to-earth liberal Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci) vies with flamboyant conservative Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) as well as with Africa’s favourite son, the supposedly reactionary Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati). A Canadian prelate, Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), is also in the running.

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As these favourites jockey for position, complications arise. Rumours swirl of shady behaviour on the part of Cardinal Tremblay while an unexpected newcomer, Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), makes his mysterious presence felt. Benitez, the Archbishop of Kabul, Afghanistan, produces documentation that the late pontiff appointed him to the cardinalate but kept the matter secret.

Neither references to Lawrence’s shaky hold on his faith nor the clay feet several of his colleagues turn out to possess are cause for much alarm. But rival viewpoints within the Church are caricatured with a broad brush in director Edward Berger’s adaptation of Robert Harris’ 2016 novel — and the deck is predictably stacked in favour of those who advocate change.

As scripted by Peter Straughan, the movie gets canon law wrong, since promotions such as Benitez’s — traditionally known as nominations “in pectore” (within the chest) — are null and void if not publicly announced during the lifetime of the pope who made them. And Benedict XVI is implicitly slandered in the dialogue via an allusion to a past pontiff who fought for Hitler.

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Conclave also traffics in sordid secrets of varying plausibility in the lead-up to a climactic revelation that many will find offensively exploitative, others merely loopy — the newly elected pope turns out to be a biological woman who appears to be a man and was raised male. Since this concerns a rare anatomical anomaly rather than any kind of lifestyle choice, its inclusion makes more of a symbolic statement than an ethical one — either acceptable or otherwise.

This is where an Indiana priest has warned against watching the film in a recent YouTube video message, and many Catholics may agree. Fr. Jonathon Meyer of All Saints Parish in Guilford, Indiana, calls Conclave “a mockery of our faith.” 

This film “is about eroding salvation, about mocking salvation, this is about discrediting the Holy Roman Catholic Church,” said Meyer.“There has to be a point where you say, ‘Absolutely not, enough is enough.’ I don’t need to see Conclave and neither do you.”

Still, for all the delicacy and bet-hedging with which the matter is handled, it constitutes a characteristic instance of the way the picture elevates the pieties of the current zeitgeist over eternal truths. Thus Lawrence assures his peers early on that the ultimate sin is certainty.

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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.

(With files from Catholic Register Staff.)