Fiennes is broodingly compelling as a potential English pope caught up in murky Vatican intrigue around choosing the next pontiff

Who knew that the laborious process of democracy, of simply voting over and over again, could be so exciting and so amusing? Edward Berger’s drama is adapted with masterly flair by screenwriter Peter Straughan from the Robert Harris pageturner; Ralph Fiennes is on sumptuous form as the deeply troubled Cardinal Lawrence at the centre of a murky Vatican plot. The result is a high-camp gripper, like the world’s most serious Carry On film.

Fiennes’ character is Italian in Harris’s book, but Straughan makes him an Englishman: an unquiet soul who is theoretically on the verge of becoming the first English pope since Adrian IV, although no one is so vulgar or nationalistic as to point that out. With the ailing pope in extremis, Cardinal Lawrence arrives at His Holiness’s death bed to find other ambitious cardinals, who have all cultivated an opaque, unreadable manner of cordially respectful friendship with each other, now manoeuvring to be considered the successor in the imminent conclave, or election. In this blue chip supporting cast Stanley Tucci plays Bellini, the liberal; Sergio Castellitto is pugnacious, reactionary Tedesco, a racist bigot; John Lithgow is Tremblay, whose blandly emollient manner is misleading; Lucian Msamati is the bullish Adeyemi; and Carlos Diehz is Benitez, an unknown figure who to everyone’s polite consternation had been created Cardinal Archbishop of Kabul without anyone realising. Yet all of these men are upstaged by the late pontiff’s confidante Sister Agnes, shrewdly played by Isabella Rossellini.