There are those who would have you think that faith is a matter of believing hardest, of shaping the world to the believer’s will despite all evidence to the contrary. Their prayers are loud, their songs and smugness even louder. This is faith as a competition, as magical thinking, which is to say, as delusion—a way of seeing the world not as it is, but solely as a reflection of the believer’s beliefs. Go too far down this path, and faith becomes a cudgel, a source of shame, a means of control, an excuse to drive out the outsider, a tool that props up excuses to imprison, enslave, even murder.
Then there are those who draw the line, who refuse to have their faith co-opted as a tool for control. I’ve seen this conscientious refusal most clearly in the coalition of faith communities who have turned out to protest the Broadview ICE processing facility in Chicago: Indigenous Americans, Catholics, Methodists, Jews, Muslims, and Unitarians who have stood, shoulder to shoulder, with lay citizens to protest the treatment of the people being held there. The work is nothing new; they’ve been doing this for 19 years, providing the Eucharist to prisoners and officers alike. The work is about faith as a bridge, one of many possible expressions of the late Pope Francis’s teaching in his encyclical letter Fratelli Tutti, about God’s love and gift of dignity to every single person, regardless of borders or background. An expression of faith as affirmation of human dignity and interconnectedness in an increasingly shattered world.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025, dir. Rian Johnson) and Conclave (2024, dir. Edward Berger) depict faith at work in a world that’s dark and growing darker. Each deals with a church at an inflection point, having recently lost a central leader; rudderless, the remaining faithful must decide on the direction they want to go. My own faith tradition—similar to the faith depicted in both these movies—finds hope for redemption through Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. It’s a faith whose central figure preached good news for the desperate and liberation for the downtrodden: powerful ideas that feel so far away in desperate times. Each film holds faith up to the light and asks: In times like these, what are the faithful to do?
death
Both Wake Up Dead Man and Conclave concern themselves with Hollywood’s favorite Christian denomination, the Catholic Church. While it isn’t representative of all Christianity—there have been many schisms about this exact thing—it’s an appropriately cinematic stand-in for the Christian church as a whole. The incense, the candles, the art, the weight of liturgy and tradition, beautiful and terrible. The church has been a source of spiritual encouragement and a well of deep pain for many worldwide. Throughout it all, the individuals who make up the church must ask themselves, over and over, if the ideals they believe in are worth the hurt inflicted by their faith communities. Often the math is discouraging.
Wake Up Dead Man is about a single parish in the fictional town of Chimney Rock, New York, the church writ small and embodied by the petty grievances of a sick and sad parish. Conclave is framed as a war for the soul of the entire Catholic Church, its plot turning on the election of a new pope after the death of his immediate predecessor. Both feature protagonists who are broken men, priests who feel that they are not the right people to fulfill the tasks they have been called to complete. Both movies begin with what feels like the end of the world.
In Conclave, the aftermath of the Pope’s death is both grand and ordinary. We miss the moment of passing, but observe the prayer and ceremony marking the immediate aftermath of the occasion, which takes place in traditional Latin in a spare room with walls of marble and crimson. He has pill bottles and a Bible propped open by his reading glasses on his nightstand, items that could belong on any other night stand beside the deathbed of any other elderly man in the world. The passing of the Pope would be ordinary, except it means the weight of the leadership of the Catholic Church will be left for someone else to carry. The shroud covering the dead Pope’s face is translucent white, as is the body bag he’s zipped into. The veil is thin; in the Vatican, the physical and spiritual keep bleeding into each other.
In Wake Up Dead Man, the parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude has lost Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), the fiery priest who’d shepherded them from the pulpit with angry sermons designed expressly to get new churchgoers to walk out in shame or anger or fear. The church building is an Old-World architectural style that the assistant pastor describes as “closer to Disneyland” than to anything that would have been contemporary to the time in which it was built. Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) describes the feelings of “grandeur” he knows he’s supposed to feel when he walks in the door in clinical terms, before launching into his reasons why he prefers “to kneel at the altar of the rational” where he can find a “truth [he] can swallow without choking.” The sleuth is a skeptic to his core. Depending on the light, the church could be a place of peace—or home to a more sinister plot. Wicks’s death is swift and unexpected, a sudden and violent collapse that shatters his tiny parish and leaves the associate priest, Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), as both primary witness and suspect number one.
Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude has a foundation built on vengeful anger, reinforced by a story related by Martha (Glenn Close), the church secretary, organist, and de facto altar guild. “She knew where the bodies were buried,” says Jud, describing the state of the church—suspicious, angry, fearful that its ugly secrets might come to light, willing to gossip openly about outsiders, greedy for power. The faithful few who stayed week after week through Wicks’ angry sermons chose to do so because “even if in the light of day it’s indefensible, deep down in the dark, it scratches an itch.” It feels good to think you’re in the good books of a powerful man, fortified against potential invaders, real or imagined.
The parishioners all feel alone, isolated by the various ways they’ve been hurt: a concert cellist (Cailee Spaeny) who’s had to give up her career due to chronic pain; a recently divorced doctor (Jeremy Renner); a failed politician (Daryl McCormack); a lawyer who’s been forced to take over her father’s firm instead of creating something for herself (Kerry Washington). One, an eccentric science fiction writer (Andrew Scott), even builds a literal moat around his house. In his eyes, it’s a political statement; through the film’s lens, the statement is pathetic, a manifestation of fear made ridiculous, a grown man thinking he can protect himself from the outside world he fears, armed with a shallow ditch and a garden hose.
The cardinals of Conclave find themselves cut off from the outside world and at odds with each other, each camp forming into small knots of factions supporting candidates hopeful for the papacy. Upon the death of the Pope, the Catholic Church finds itself at a crossroads; the last man to hold the job had attempted to institute reforms over the objections of more traditionalist priests. The voices calling for retrenchment back to the pre-Vatican II days are loud; those looking to enact additional reform are scattered. They meet in corridors and stairwells and the dark shadows of a literal theater, whispering about voting strategies but incapable of creating a unified coalition. Their machinations are as baroque as their surroundings.
A few reformers, led by Dean Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), want to elect Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a cardinal who professes a belief that “women should play more of a role” in the leadership of the church. This in the same breath he draws after waiting silently for a group of nuns serving the conclave to pass the room—out of fear that the nuns might pass along the information to another faction, or perhaps out of the belief that the women would not be worthy to take part in the discussion. The knot of cardinals conferring over the future of the church are willing to express their desire for a more progressive Catholicism, but they’re most comfortable sinking back into the traditional gender roles their faith has reinforced for centuries. They all talk with fear that the action they aspire to would contradict tradition, and perhaps undermine the power they wield within the walls of the Vatican.
Other threads are cause for distraction in Lawrence’s view. As the conclave convenes, a previously-unknown cardinal named Benitez (Carlos Diehz) arrives, claiming to have been ordained Bishop of Kabul in secret by the Pope before he died. There’s civil unrest in Rome and throughout the rest of Europe; explosions rock the city. One night Lawrence hears shouting in the corridor between another cardinal and a female voice; he’s constantly seeking news from the outside world while denying his investment in current events. Lawrence is afraid for the future of the Church and uncertain of his own soul.
Both Conclave and Wake Up Dead Man are set in churches that have seen the growing darkness and decided to close ranks. Holding off the dark, defending against perceived invaders, feels like the safest thing to do; from next to the fire, the unknown is frightening. Both films confront the reality of the cyclical nature of sin; with each passing year, we invent new ways to suspect and exclude each other. Fratelli Tutti was written in part as a reaction to a splintered world in which everyone gets what they think they want at the cost of true human connection. “We are more alone than ever,” wrote Pope Francis.
burial
It feels like death to confront the darkness at the heart of something you’ve long believed is supposed to bring light and peace. Worse still to consider the task and realize that you’re just one person, incapable of changing the system by yourself.
Jud feels as though he isn’t the right man for the job at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. He’s a former boxer-turned-priest, and admits that in his previous life as a fighter, he killed another man in the ring “with hate in my heart.” His fighting days are over, but his fighting instinct still hasn’t left him. When physically confronted, he raises his hands in front of his face in a defensive posture, his closed fists forming weapons. Every time he returns to the posture of his former profession, he leaves it with a sense of shame, O’Connor slumping his shoulders just a little lower than they had been before. He’s beset on all sides. Wicks had been outright hostile to him before he died. The faithful few of Wicks’ flock don’t trust him.
Cardinal Lawrence doesn’t trust himself. He’d wrestled with his own doubts for a long time before the Pope’s death, and the advent of the conclave means a fresh crisis of faith. It’s his duty as dean to organize and run the conclave, a job he never wanted. He’d tried to resign quietly months before, and the previous Pope had refused him, saying he was well-suited to managing the affairs of the Vatican. He’s been called to preach to the other cardinals in the absence of higher leadership for the church despite a slipping hold on his own faith.
Lawrence is a man both inside the system and out of it: a manager whose soul is uncertain of the work, a man of faith who wants so desperately to believe. He’s sequestered himself from the outside world by the conclave, and from the conclave by nature of his position as dean, watching the machinations of the other cardinals jockeying for a chance to be the new Pope. He’s supposed to be above the influence of both the outside world and inside politics, but like it or not, an election is politics. The night before the conclave, he sits on his bed, shaking. “You’re a manager,” he tells himself bitterly. “Manage.” We don’t get to choose the crises we must weather. Big or small, individual or historically significant, they come for us, and we have no say about whether they will affect our own lives.
Jud and Lawrence cannot control the wheels that have already been set in motion. The parishioners at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude would have been against Jud no matter who he’d been. Lawrence might be the dean of the College of Cardinals, but every other man around him is powerful in his own right. He wants change and doesn’t feel he can enact it. He’s beholden to the tradition and liturgy that governs the rhythms of his faith; the prayers and intonations are both constricting and freeing, granting him the ability to express his beliefs when they falter, but also leaving him stuck in a position with the appearance of power but little room to wield it. Stray too far from tradition and risk losing credibility; stick too close to it and risk stagnation.
For Lawrence, failure to elect a progressive Pope would mean setting the Church back in time. Most of the hopefuls are discouraging. Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) represents hope for a more inclusive church—he’d be the first African pope—as well as a more conservative attitude with regard to human sexuality. Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow) is a power-hungry embezzler, a manipulative man. Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) is by far the most dire option, a man who shouts at his subordinates and who believes the Church should never have moved beyond speaking Latin in Mass.
Tedesco, in particular, is a realization of Lawrence’s most grave fears of being forced to serve a regressive Pope who does not believe in allowing women to join Church leadership, who would prefer that queer people didn’t exist, who would rather trade the variety and diversity of the contemporary Church for a more homogenous way of doing things. Tedesco is bitter that there hasn’t been an Italian pope in this century yet; his idea of unity is a homogeneity that folds everyone else under his own umbrella, forcing the Other to live and think just like him. Tedesco’s xenophobia is a symptom of the increasingly fractured world outside the Vatican’s walls—and the sickness that threatens to consume the church from within. He’s the antithesis of Fratelli Tutti, which repeats Jesus’ teaching “to recognize Christ himself in each of our abandoned or excluded brothers and sisters,” regardless of race or religion or country of origin.
As for Jud, in his own small parish, failure would mean conviction of a murder he says he didn’t commit. It would also mean the loss of his priesthood, a calling to serve that he finds comforting. He’s a kind man, earnest about his desire to serve; the parish’s distrust of him even before Wicks’s death is painful. To try to break down their walls, he invites the core group of parishioners to a prayer meeting, beginning their time together by offering up the story about his own past. He’s imperfect and he knows it; he tells them that Jesus “didn’t transform me, he sustains me every day.” Jud is still the same man who killed someone else in the ring. He’s vulnerable, perhaps even more than he’d been when he fought other men for a living.
resurrection
Redemption doesn’t come from power; it comes from rejecting it, giving and accepting love instead. “Christ came to heal the world, not to fight it,” says Jud. To illustrate, he uses his hands. “This,” spreading his arms open as if to embrace someone—“not this,” closing his hands into defensive fists as he falls back into a boxer’s stance. As he describes the call to heal, his knuckles are still bruised from punching someone else in a moment of anger. The faith he aspires to is something he can’t live up to by himself. The life to which he’s been called demands that grace flow both ways between him and those he serves. Jud can’t save everyone. His religion teaches that only Christ can do that.
As he and Blanc search for clues to the mystery at the heart of the film, Jud keeps finding himself pulled away. A possible lead in the form of a phone conversation turns into an impromptu instance of spiritual care. The woman on the other end of the line (Bridget Everett) interrupts herself to ask a question she sounds afraid to ask: “Father, would you…could you…oh, God. Will you pray for me?”
The camera, which up until that point has held the woman—Louise—at a distance in a medium shot, cuts from Jud’s surprised face back to hers, this time in close-up. She’s on the verge of tears as the story spills out of her: a difficult relationship with a parent in hospice. “I’m feeling pretty alone right now,” she tells him. Jud has other things to do. He pauses, but only for a second. He turns his back on the to-do list and asks her to tell him what she needs prayer for. The next time we see him, he’s still praying, and Louise is still on the line with him. The mystery can wait. Healing and human connection are more important than proving yourself right.
The desire to be right, to win, is a heady temptation. Lawrence and the rest of the progressive faction in Conclave have been steadily losing votes as Tedesco secures his own backing, all other candidates having fallen away. In a moment of despair, Lawrence admits that, though he’s been denying it the entire time, he does want the papacy. When asked by another which name he’d take if chosen, he hesitates only for a second before saying it.
He’s stopped by a literal explosion, rocks raining down from the roof of the Sistine Chapel as he casts his vote for himself. (The film itself remains agnostic, tied to the earthly goings-on of the cardinals with no bright lights or signs from heaven; the bombing is possibly a coincidence, though a man proud enough to want to lay claim to the papacy, as an adherent of a religion in which he can speak directly to God, might interpret such an event as both a general disaster and personal rebuke.) The bombing forces the cardinals out of their grand surroundings and into a shabby theater, the same place Lawrence’s camp had first collected themselves in an effort to elect Bellini; the same place where they’d waited, silent, for the nuns to clear the room before having the conversation that could steer the fate of the Church.
This time, there’s shouting. Cardinal Tedesco blames the liberal faction’s “doctrine of relativism” for the bombing, claiming with no grounds that the bombs were set by Muslim immigrants, the ugliness of his xenophobia plain on his face. “How long will we persist in this weakness?” he asks. He wants a strong leader for the Church; he believes he can be that leader, with a vision to crush his enemies, “who fights these animals!”
He’s countered by Cardinal Benitez—the unlooked-for cardinal who’d been appointed and served in secret. Benitez has been voting for Lawrence in every round of the conclave, despite Lawrence’s urging to find another candidate to back. Benitez’s prior support is a sign of grace; he sees the inherent good in others that they can’t see in themselves. After Tedesco’s outburst, Benitez faces the collection of cardinals. He addresses Tedesco as “my brother,” asking, “Would you say we have to fight? What is it that you think we’re fighting?”
Verbally, he takes the same posture Jud describes: arms wide in an embrace, not closed in a fist. Even when it’s hard, even when it’s against his instincts, especially when he wants nothing more than to fight back.
“The thing you’re fighting is here,” says Benitez, resting his hand on his own heart. He’s still covered in dust from the bombing; there’s a trickle of red on his forehead, bright as his robes, from a wound on his scalp. He’s ashamed of the infighting, though he still counts himself as one of the cardinals, saying “We have shown ourselves to be small, petty men.” He holds himself as one of their number, not outside or above, as he rebukes them for their concern about power and tradition at the cost of their isolation from their own humanity.
He concludes in Spanish—another counter to Tedesco, who claims to want uniform communication amongst church leadership in Latin, but who invariably uses Italian in everyday speech, or when he’s angry. Benitez’s native language of Spanish is a living branch from Latin, just as Italian is. The two languages are presented as equal and legitimate evolutions of expression, new and enduring ways to worship and to communicate in a faith tradition that has survived for millenia. Benitez states simply: “La Iglesia no es la tradición. La Iglesia no es el pasado. La Iglesia es lo que hagamos en adelante.” The Church is not tradition. The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next.
hope for new life
The Church is what we do next.
A collective call to action, open-ended, free from restrictions or fear. As Pope Francis wrote: “We are called to love everyone, without exception; at the same time, loving an oppressor does not mean allowing him to keep oppressing us, or letting him think that what he does is acceptable.” To love someone is to recognize and uphold their inherent worth as fellow human beings. To love someone is to ensure that they can’t deny the dignity and worth of others. To love someone is to refuse to leave them alone. This is “an open-ended endeavor,” ongoing work that will never end, but that’s still worth doing.
It’s dark out. It’s getting darker. Times like these call for a clarity of spirit, a desire to do justice and to love mercy. Both Conclave and Wake Up Dead Man paint a portrait of unexpected grace—surprising, unlooked-for, vulnerable. We just need to show up and do the work.