The Conclave trailer released in advance of the film’s October 25, 2024 debut dropped several critical plot clues that most viewers overlooked on first viewing. Director Edward Berger’s adaptation of Robert Harris’s 2016 novel presented a papal thriller disguised as political intrigue, but the promotional material hid its most significant revelations in plain sight—particularly in how Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, interacts with the other cardinals during moments of apparent calm. The trailer’s dialogue snippets, framing choices, and deliberate cuts around certain characters planted seeds for the film’s most shocking twists, including the central conspiracy that would eventually earn the screenplay an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2025 Academy Awards.
Most fans focused on the surface-level setup: a conclave called after the Pope’s sudden death, with Lawrence tasked as Dean of the College of Cardinals to oversee the selection process. What the trailer actually showed, however, was a careful architecture of suspicion, with characters’ body language and hesitant line deliveries signaling problems beneath the institutional surface. The promotional cuts repeatedly positioned certain cardinals as outsiders or targets of scrutiny, but the trailer’s editors were careful to obscure which scandals would actually drive the plot forward and which were red herrings designed to misdirect audience expectations.
Table of Contents
- What the Trailer Concealed About Each Cardinal’s Hidden Agenda
- The Visual Language of Suspicion in Promotional Footage
- Cardinal Benítez and the Central Twist the Trailer Never Spoiled
- The Conclave’s Voting Procedures as Displayed in Promotional Material
- Misdirection Through Cardinal Lawrence’s Emotional Arc
- What the Novel Revealed That the Trailer Concealed
- Roger Ebert’s Rating and the Critics’ Consensus on Narrative Surprise
What the Trailer Concealed About Each Cardinal’s Hidden Agenda
The conclave trailer presented multiple cardinals as contenders for the papal throne, but it strategically avoided dwelling on their backgrounds or personal vulnerabilities. Cardinal Adeyemi received substantial screen time, positioned as a progressive voice advocating for modernization within the Church—yet the trailer never hinted that this cardinal harbored a devastating secret involving a love-child hidden from Church scrutiny. Similarly, Cardinal Tremblay appeared as a consensus builder during conclave sequences, with the trailer showing him in diplomatic, collegial moments. The promotional material completely obscured that Tremblay’s consensus-building extended to allegedly bribing other cardinals for their votes, a revelation that would reframe every one of his trailer appearances.
The editing choices around these characters reveal how trailers for prestige thrillers operate differently than marketing for action or horror films. Rather than showing plot points, the trailer communicated mood and stakes—establishing Lawrence as increasingly isolated and uncertain amid institutional pressure. By showing cardinals arguing without revealing what they argue about, the promotional material created a sense of conspiracy without defining its shape. Viewers who watched the trailer multiple times often found themselves rewatching cardinal-to-cardinal interactions, searching for tells that the promotional material had deliberately removed through careful framing and selective dialogue choices.
The Visual Language of Suspicion in Promotional Footage
Edward Berger’s cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine created imagery that emphasized isolation and surveillance, choices that the trailer amplified through its composition and color grading. The promotional footage showed cardinals in vast institutional spaces—marble hallways, ceremonial chambers, enclosed rooms where voices echoed—all of which suggested both the grandeur and the claustrophobia of the conclave process. However, the trailer’s editing obscured one critical limitation: viewers couldn’t actually determine the spatial relationships between cardinals or track who had access to whom during key moments.
The promotional cuts deliberately avoided wide shots that might have established the physical layout of the conclave space, keeping audiences disoriented in the same way Lawrence himself becomes disoriented by the proceeding’s complexity. The lighting choices in trailer segments also warrant attention. Characters shot in shadow or partial light appeared more suspicious than those lit directly, yet the trailer applied these techniques inconsistently—sometimes lighting suspects brightly and trustworthy figures in darkness, a deliberate inversion designed to undermine viewer instincts. The promotional material’s color palette, dominated by cool grays and institutional beiges, created an atmosphere where distinguishing between cardinal and cardinal became visually challenging, mirroring Lawrence’s own difficulty in reading his colleagues’ intentions and allegiances.
Cardinal Benítez and the Central Twist the Trailer Never Spoiled
The most significant clue that the trailer concealed—or rather, presented without allowing audiences to process its implications—involves Cardinal Benítez, a character positioned as the conclave’s wild card and potential papal frontrunner. The trailer showed Benítez as charismatic, popular among other cardinals, and seemingly unencumbered by the scandals plaguing other candidates. What the promotional material never explicitly revealed, though careful viewers might have detected it through subtle framing and dialogue emphasis, was that Benítez harbors a secret related to intersex identity—a revelation that becomes the film’s central dramatic pivot and the reason why the conclave’s outcome carries such profound weight.
This concealment represents a significant editorial choice by the marketing department. Revealing Benítez’s identity in the trailer would have fundamentally altered how audiences approached the film’s themes and would have invited controversy before the film reached theaters. Instead, the trailer presented Benítez as simply “the candidate nobody expects,” allowing the film to explore questions of identity, institutional acceptance, and whether the Church can reconcile its traditional teachings with the reality of human complexity. By withholding this information, the promotional material preserved the film’s dramatic impact while still hinting at Benítez’s outsider status through selective framing and dialogue fragments.
The Conclave’s Voting Procedures as Displayed in Promotional Material
The trailer included glimpses of the conclave’s voting process—cardinals casting ballots, smoke signals indicating whether a new Pope had been elected—but these sequences proved deliberately ambiguous about how votes were actually distributed. Fans who studied the trailer frame-by-frame attempted to count visible ballot papers or determine voting patterns from cardinal positioning, but the promotional material’s cinematography made such analysis impossible. The film itself would later reveal that the conclave’s voting procedures concealed deceptions and ambiguities, with the question of who actually voted for whom becoming a source of uncertainty that extends beyond the film’s conclusion.
The trailer’s approach to showing these procedures mirrors the institutional approach to information control that the film itself critiques. Just as the Church guards its internal processes from public scrutiny, the promotional material guarded the conclave’s procedural details from viewer scrutiny. This parallel between marketing strategy and institutional secrecy wasn’t accidental; it reflected the screenplay by Peter Straughan’s broader examination of how institutions manage information and shape public perception. Viewers who expected the trailer to clearly explain the voting system’s mechanics were disappointed—precisely the reaction Berger intended, as the film’s exploration of institutional opacity depends on audiences experiencing confusion and uncertainty.
Misdirection Through Cardinal Lawrence’s Emotional Arc
Ralph Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence serves as the audience’s primary point of identification, and the trailer presented him as a man increasingly disturbed by what he discovers during the conclave. Early trailer shots show Lawrence calm, institutional, performing his duties—but later fragments present him visibly shaken, determined, and conflicted. The promotional material never clarified what specific discoveries trigger Lawrence’s transformation, instead creating a mounting sense of dread without defining its source. This narrative strategy proved particularly effective because audiences naturally projected their own concerns onto Lawrence’s visible distress, assuming various revelations might have triggered his crisis.
The trailer’s editing emphasized moments where Lawrence confronts other cardinals or questions the conclave’s procedures, but it obscured the actual logical sequence of Lawrence’s investigations. Viewers watching the promotional material couldn’t determine whether Lawrence was pursuing Adeyemi’s secret, investigating Tremblay’s alleged bribery, or wrestling with the Benítez revelation. This ambiguity created a warning for film analysts: trailers for institutional thrillers deliberately withhold causal connections between events, forcing audiences to construct their own narratives and then surprising them by revealing that the actual causal chain differs substantially from their assumptions. The marketing material didn’t lie about what happened; it simply presented events in an order designed to obscure their significance.
What the Novel Revealed That the Trailer Concealed
Robert Harris’s source novel, published in 2016, provided the foundation for Straughan’s screenplay, but the trailer never referenced the book or indicated how closely the adaptation followed Harris’s plot. Readers of the novel possessed crucial advantages when watching the trailer, immediately recognizing references and understanding the severity of various cardinals’ secrets. However, the filmmaking team deliberately avoided marketing the film as a prestige literary adaptation; instead, it positioned Conclave as an original thriller, allowing audiences unfamiliar with the source material to experience genuine surprise. This strategy meant that book readers who caught trailer references to the novel’s plot points possessed inside information that casual viewers completely missed.
The trailer’s approach to the novel-to-film adaptation process reveals how promotional material functions differently for literature-based projects. Rather than highlighting the screenplay’s fidelity to its source, the marketing team emphasized the thriller elements and institutional intrigue, assuming that audiences unfamiliar with Harris’s work wouldn’t recognize the trailer’s subtle nods to specific plot developments. This created a hierarchy of viewer experience: those who had read the novel brought contextual understanding to the trailer, while those encountering the story fresh experienced precisely the misdirection that Berger and Straughan intended. The marketing gamble paid off; the film’s Oscar recognition for Best Adapted Screenplay acknowledged that Straughan’s screenplay successfully transported the novel’s thematic concerns into a visual medium while preserving its central twist.
Roger Ebert’s Rating and the Critics’ Consensus on Narrative Surprise
The film ultimately earned a 7.4/10 on IMDb, with critics consistently emphasizing that Conclave delivered “unexpected twists” and “a final reveal audiences won’t see coming.” These critical consensus points directly confirm that the film’s marketing strategy succeeded—audiences emerged from theaters surprised and disoriented in precisely the way the trailer had prepared them to be. The trailer’s refusal to telegraph plot developments, combined with its emphasis on mood and institutional paranoia, created conditions where viewers entered the film with genuine uncertainty about how the story would resolve. Critics who praised the narrative’s “unexpected” quality were actually praising the filmmaking team’s success in maintaining secrecy through both the promotional campaign and the film itself.
This critical reception validates the specific clues that the trailer both revealed and concealed. By showing Cardinal Lawrence’s growing distress without explaining its source, the promotional material replicated the experience that critics identified as the film’s greatest strength: an audience kept perpetually off-balance, uncertain about which characters can be trusted and what information actually matters. The trailer’s concealment of Benítez’s identity, the exact nature of each cardinal’s scandal, and the voting procedures’ actual mechanics all contributed to a promotional strategy that preserved the film’s narrative impact. Audiences who watched the trailer and felt frustrated by its refusal to provide clear plot information had actually experienced precisely what Berger intended—a preview that suggested complexity and conspiracy without resolving into clarity.
