Some stories don’t announce themselves as connected—you just feel it, like déjà vu that won’t quite resolve. Watching Traqués / The Hunt (2025), that sensation creeps in early. Not from a specific scene, not even from a character, but from the way tension is constructed. That slow, almost methodical transition from order to breakdown. And once you’ve seen it before, it becomes difficult to unsee. The closest structural ancestor is unmistakably Shoot.

Edward Berger’s Conclave is not really about Catholicism. It’s about institutions — what they conceal, what they protect, and what happens when the machinery of legitimacy meets a secret it cannot process. That it’s set inside the Vatican is almost incidental. The College of Cardinals could be a corporate board, a politburo, a supreme court. The dynamic is identical. Ralph Fiennes plays Cardinal Lawrence, tasked with managing a papal election after the sudden death of the Pope.

There’s a particular kind of betrayal that only beloved franchises can pull off. It’s not the betrayal of a bad sequel, which at least has the decency to feel like an accident. This is something more premeditated—the kind where everyone involved clearly watched the original, absorbed its surfaces, and then systematically hollowed out everything underneath. Immortal Man does not fail despite its ambitions. It fails through them. Congratulations are almost in order.