An incoming awards season contender in which Voldemort becomes the guardian of the hottest gossip does a premature victory lap on streaming

We’re on the precipice of another cinematic awards season, and the starting blocks are getting loaded up with some decidedly exciting pictures. Between the comedic-yet-devastating humanism of A Real Pain and Anora, more traditional customers like The Brutalist and A Complete Unknown, and sturdy genre fare like Wicked and The Substance, it’s a colorful cast of contenders indeed.

Also among the crowd is Conclave, the Edward Berger-directed mystery thriller and one of the more anomalous runners in this race. It bears the sheen of a prestige picture while harboring an undercurrent of cheeky genre pulp, and masquerades as an out-and-out “dad movie” while its diegetic self-seriousness interacts madly with its unwavering commitment to social justice.

But the biggest plus? It’s an awards season contender that the average citizen has relatively easy access to. Per FlixPatrol, Conclave is fifth most-watched film on the United States’ Peacock film charts at the time of writing, boxed in by the outrageous duo of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (fourth place), and Penguins of Madagascar (fifth place). It’s the type of situation that only a film like Conclave would find itself in.

Conclave stars Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence, who finds himself tasked with overseeing the election of a new pope after the incumbent one dies of a heart attack. Political battle lines are drawn as candidates seek that coveted (and not-so-coveted) two-thirds majority vote, but it’s Lawrence’s personal investigation into the conclave’s many scandals — along with the arrival of the mysterious Cardinal Benitez — that will prove to be the true bastion for deciding the future of the Catholic Church.

Conclave is fascinating in the sense that it endeavors to pull back the curtain on human behavior and impulse on both a narrative and technical level. The cardinals share their stories and insights about love, doubt, tolerance, fear, anger, and progress, all while the film encourages you to focus on those emotional ideas rather than the more mechanical mystery and political chess matches that move the plot forward.

Should one instead invest in the drama, however, they may find themselves swept up in a carnival of crimson-clad divas whose incessant gossip and conflict might be harder and harder to take seriously after a while. This, while all the cardinals have a very solemn devotion to their jobs as though the world depends on them, as though the Catholic Church isn’t pathologically disconnected from the wider world that it wants to serve; a world that’s none the wiser to the catty rollercoaster that led to the election of the new pope.

Indeed, it’s stupendously deft filmmaking from Berger and his collaborators, and it’s all culminated in some well-deserved Golden Globe attention that could very well translate into some Oscar nominations. A win might be too great of a miracle for even God to will, but who’s to say that Cardinal Lawrence won’t dig up some dirt on the Academy that swings the votes in Conclave‘s favor?