Edward Berger’s papal potboiler reveals the self-serving unscrupulousness of holy men. Here, Victoria Luxford considers cinema’s sinister ministers, from There Will Be Blood to The Night of the Hunter.
Edward Berger’s tense new thriller Conclave draws back the curtain on one of the Catholic Church’s most solemn traditions. Following the death of the Pope, Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the Dean of the College of Cardinals, oversees a sequestered conclave as they vote to appoint a new pontiff. However, political wrangling and rumours among the voting cardinals lead him to unveil a shocking conspiracy.
Lawrence’s conundrum challenges his faith in the sanctity of the Church. One by one, his assumptions about the purity of the papal candidates are shattered by evidence of scandal. His enduring belief that the purest heart will be chosen is challenged by the more practical Cardinal Sabbadin (Merab Ninidze). ‘We’ll never find a candidate who doesn’t have a black mark against them,’ he explains during a secret meeting on a stairway, with both men standing in the shadows as if avoiding God’s gaze. ‘We’re mortal men. We serve an ideal, we cannot always be ideal.’
An innocent man within a system sullied by ambition, Lawrence refuses to believe that this holiest of offices could be held by a morally flawed man. Further disappointment arises when Lawrence finds concealed documents proving the late pope illegally spied on potential successors in order to jeopardise their campaigns. Heartbroken, he enters the papal chambers and finds his glasses on the bedside table. Berger’s camera is tight on the glasses in his hands, panning up to Lawrence looking at them, as if staring his late superior in the eye. The camera stops on Lawrence as he weeps bitterly. For him, the loss of belief in the deceased pope has been as wounding as the crime itself.
Priests with dark secrets have been a shocking element of many films, largely because the moral dichotomy between representing virtue while doing ill is so narratively fertile. Traditionally, priests and holy men are positioned as humble pillars of the community, good people to be trusted and revered. However, just as the sight of a demonic child challenges our perception of innocence in horror films, there’s something about a bad priest that feels unsettling on screen.
Conclave (2024)
In There Will Be Blood (2008), Paul Dano plays Eli Sunday, a rural preacher in 20th-century America who exploits his standing in the community to fulfil his financial greed. His attempts to extort money from oil prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) are thwarted, resulting in Eli receiving a public beating from Plainview. Following the fracas, Eli sits muddied and seething at the dinner table with his family. Director Paul Thomas Anderson focuses on Eli’s eyes as he glowers with rising rage. He berates his father for his initial dealings with Plainview, asking ‘do you think God is going to save you for being stupid?’ shortly before launching off the table and pinning him to the ground, blaming his failings on him. It’s a scene that reveals Eli truly worships money, and is willing to dishonour his father in pursuit of it.
More of this corruption is unveiled in the film’s final confrontation, where he visits Plainview to drill on his land. In exchange for his help and a substantial financial advance, Plainview asks that Eli stand and declare repeatedly ‘I am a false prophet and God is a superstition’. Going from tall and proud to hunched and nervous, Dano shows Eli crossing an unthinkable line for any holy man, forsaking God for money. When Plainview reveals he has no need for the land he is offering, Eli crumbles and tearfully blames God who ‘failed to alert’ him to the troubled economy. In both instances, Eli uses God as a means of getting what he wants. His faith extends as far as his profit, with the cross on his neck becoming a tool of intimidation that is ultimately useless against his more aggressive rival.
There Will Be Blood (2008)
One of the most famous sinister preachers in cinema wasn’t a preacher at all. Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) is the chilling antagonist of 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, and from the beginning is introduced as someone who uses faith to cloak his evil. Following an introductory monologue warning children of ‘false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly they are ravening wolves’, we meet one such wolf. The film opens with boys discovering a dead body, before crossfading to Powell speeding down a country road in his car. If it wasn’t already implied he was the murderer, he all but confirms it in an unsettling conversation with ‘God’.
‘Well now, what’s it to be Lord? Another widow? How many has it been? Six? Twelve? I disremember,’ he says, looking to the sky with an unnervingly cheerful grin as he goes on to underline his deeds. ‘Not that You mind the killin’s. Your Book is full of killin’s. But there are things you do hate Lord: perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.’ Within that speech, Powell’s motivation and justification for murder is clear. Either delusionally or through conceit, he uses ‘God’s will’ as reasoning for his violent misogyny. He seduces and kills widows for money, escaping suspicion by using the veneer of respectability that comes with the image of a holy man. As he makes his way to his main target – the children of a dead cellmate who know where he hid $10,000 – there’s no doubt as to what this wolf is capable of.
Conclave (2024)
Neither Eli Sunday nor Harry Powell are condemnations of any church or belief system. Rather, they are an illustration of what happens when immoral forces become pillars of a community. In Conclave, Cardinal Lawrence fights to prevent that very outcome. Addressing the cardinals before they take a vote, he says, ‘There is one sin that I have come to fear above all others… certainty. If there was only certainty, and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore, no need for faith.’ In resisting his certainty about the purity of his colleagues, he retains his faith that the next pope will be a good one.
WATCH CONCLAVE IN CINEMAS
