Plot Twist: 'Conclave' and Cardinal Benítez's secret

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Conclave.

If the title Conclave sounds familiar, it’s because Edward Berger’s film is adapted from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel—a tightly wound story about a Vatican locked behind its own walls for 71 hours as more than a hundred cardinals gather to elect a new pope. It’s the oldest election process on Earth, and Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) turns it into a study of silence, power, and faith.

Ralph Fiennes plays Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the man charged with keeping the process orderly. He’s a believer, a priest with doubts who’s loyal to the structure even as he quietly wonders what it hides. From the moment he walks into the walled villa where the cardinals will live, eat, and vote in secret, the film hums with unease. You can hear it in the shuffle of shoes on marble, the closing of heavy doors, the first locked click of the outside world fading away.

For the first hour, Conclave plays like a chamber thriller. The ballots burn, and rival factions begin to form. Then comes the late arrival: Cardinal Vincent Benítez, played by Carlos Diehz, a compassionate, progressive outsider whose warmth unsettles the hierarchy. His kindness feels almost dangerous in a room built on formality.

When Benítez unexpectedly wins the final vote, the film seems to have reached a tidy resolution. The world waits outside for the new pope’s first blessing. But Berger saves his boldest moment for the end.

Behind closed doors, Pope-elect Benítez calls Lawrence to his chambers. What unfolds is a confession: he tells Lawrence that he was born intersex, possessing both male and female reproductive organs. He once considered surgery, but the late pope forbade it and instead elevated him to higher office, urging him to serve as he was. “I am what God made me,” Benítez says.

Lawrence listens, stunned. The man tasked with guarding the Church’s order now faces a secret that could shatter it. In that moment, the film’s center of gravity from politics to grace. Lawrence chooses to keep Benítez’s identity private, not out of fear but reverence. The secrecy that once protected corruption now shelters compassion. The act itself becomes a kind of faith.

Conclave never pretends the Church will transform overnight, but it imagines a seed planted and the possibility that faith could someday mean inclusion instead of exclusion. The story’s restraint makes it feel believable: no revolt, just two people choosing understanding over fear.

Fiennes anchors it all with extraordinary stillness. His performance is about listening—the rare kind of acting that makes silence feel active. You can see the shift in his expression as duty gives way to empathy. In Lawrence’s eyes, the Church is no longer something to defend; it’s something to protect from itself.

In the end, Benítez becomes Pope Innocent. Only Lawrence knows the truth, and that secret becomes the film’s quiet miracle. It’s not about deception; it’s about mercy.

For a story set inside the oldest patriarchal system on Earth, Conclave feels startlingly modern. It asks what belief looks like when it stops insisting on definitions—and whether the holiest act might be letting someone be exactly who they are.