Sturdy, classic storytelling and a peerless cast led by Ralph Fiennes’s anxious cardinal make this drama of Vatican intrigue a solid bet

Could it? Would it? Until it picked up best film at the Bafta awards, no one had really been taking this papal intrigue drama all that seriously – all the smart money was on one of two very American films: Anora and The Brutalist. (Even more so after Emilia Pérez’s spectacular Karla Sofía Gascón-related blow-out.) But could Conclave pull off a Green Book-style surge to the line, getting past more fashionable and/or artsy efforts through the virtues of sturdy, muscular storytelling?

For this is surely the basis of Conclave’s appeal to Oscar voters. Although blessed by brilliant, subtle performances (courtesy of Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini and John Lithgow among others), and handsomely mounted design and camerawork, Conclave’s great strength is its narrative furniture, a build-out of the microcosm that is the papal court. It has a head start, of course, in its source material: Robert Harris has to be the king of the issue-based suspense novel, and the practised ease of the storytelling is the ballast that keeps the film afloat. (Harris’s screen-adaptation ratio is remarkable, from Fatherland and Enigma back in the day, to the Polanski-directed projects The Ghost and An Officer and a Spy.)