Conclave movie streaming: Forget the twist ending. There’s a bigger problem.

No one gets any drinks thrown at them in Conclave. Related From Slate It Seemed Like This Year’s Safest Oscar Pick—Until It Revealed One Final Surprise Fans of the movie seem bizarrely determined to praise an alternate, better version of it that only really exists in their heads. I felt like a crazy person reading the Times describe how at another point Tremblay is “shamed when Rossellini’s Sister Agnes reads him for filth.” I went back to the scene in question, and the most substantial thing Sister Agnes says in it is, “She was indeed here at the specific request of Cardinal Tremblay.” The subtly of this reveal, the way that it’s not a bombastic accusation but a simple fact, is what’s noteworthy about it, but sure, let’s call that “reading for filth.” I can accept that some of the glee over Conclave is hyperbolic—as the Times admits, “it’s amusing to get really excited about a movie about priests”—but then the paper hits us with “These men of the cloth are just as chaotic and messy as the backstabbers of reality television and prime-time soap operas.” Again, show me the cardinal who could go toe to toe with Kristen Doute and then we can talk. I can see how you might be tempted to say it was “so Conclave” when, in the Vanderpump Rules universe, Doute once orchestrated bringing a woman from a man’s past into a closed environment to humiliate him, but she did it purely out of spite, and that’s the missing ingredient here: These cardinals are motivated by principles, which is so much less fun. Unfortunately, it seems like people have become so enamored with the idea of a fun, intrigue-filled movie about cardinals that they have failed to consider that this isn’t actually the movie Edward Berger made.