In a cynical age, Los Dos Papas offers an unfashionable virtue: hope. It reminds us that two old men, arguing about God in a garden, can be more thrilling than any superhero. And that sometimes, the most revolutionary act is to listen.
Released on Netflix to critical acclaim, the film arrived at a moment when the real-world Catholic Church was fracturing between reactionary traditionalists and reformists. By focusing on the transition from Pope Benedict XVI to Pope Francis, Los Dos Papas does not just document a historical handover; it invents a spiritual thriller where the only weapons are guilt, confession, and the Sistine Chapel’s floor tiles. The film’s engine is its casting. Anthony Hopkins as Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and Jonathan Pryce as Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis) deliver masterclasses in internal conflict. Hopkins plays Benedict not as a villain, but as a lonely scholar. His Ratzinger is a man who loves the Church as an abstract, perfect architecture of doctrine. He is rigid, brilliant, and terrified of the mob. When he plays the piano in the papal summer residence, he looks less like a pontiff and more like a retired professor who has outlived his century. los dos papas
This levity is not disrespectful; it is radical. The film argues that the sacred is found in the profane. When Francis later sneaks out of the Vatican to minister to the homeless or when Benedict quietly slips away into retirement, the film celebrates the small, rebellious acts of humanity. In a cynical age, Los Dos Papas offers
Benedict’s response is the film’s theological heart. Instead of issuing a punishment, he forgives Bergoglio and then, shockingly, asks for forgiveness himself. The man who built his career defending doctrinal purity admits that he has been a poor shepherd because he could not connect with his flock. "I am a book, you are a street," Benedict says. In that admission, the film suggests that holiness is not about being right, but about being vulnerable. Los Dos Papas is deeply aware of the media age. The film intercuts its quiet conversations with the chaos of the 2005 and 2013 conclaves: the black smoke, the white smoke, the screaming crowds in St. Peter’s Square. Meirelles, the director of City of God , brings a kinetic, almost documentary energy to these sequences. The cardinals whisper in Latin while the world tweets. The clash is not just between two men, but between the medieval and the digital. Released on Netflix to critical acclaim, the film
In the annals of cinema, few films have dared to place two men in a room, set them at ideological odds, and emerge with something as fragile and revolutionary as hope. Fernando Meirelles’ Los Dos Papas (2019) is precisely that film. On its surface, it is a buddy dramedy set in the gilded cages of the Vatican. But beneath the Latin chanting and the white cassocks lies a searing, profoundly human argument about the nature of faith, the burden of tradition, and the terrifying necessity of change.