Jude Law haunts Paolo Sorrentino’s glorious follow-up to The Young Pope, but Malkovich’s purring pontiff-in-waiting is divine

Anyone who was captivated by Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope will be relieved that his follow-up, The New Pope, is just as rich and ravishing and gloriously enigmatic. It provides another deep dive into the hidden world of the Vatican City, marvelling at its mystique with agnostic fervour. The Venice film festival screened two episodes of the forthcoming eight-part series, each preceded by an abridged summary of what went before. But even in this bowdlerised form, it looks splendid, like Michelangelo’s Pietà, which is scarred by a terrorist bomb at the top of episode seven.

The New Pope (a co-production by Sky Atlantic, HBO and Canal+) picks up where The Young Pope left off, with Pius XIII (Jude Law) in a coma and the Holy See scurrying to come up with a replacement. The most viable candidate is Sir John Brannox (beautifully embodied by John Malkovich), an intellectual English aristo renowned for a theological text, The Middle Way, that he wrote in his youth. On arriving at his stately pile, with its shades of Brideshead Revisited, the Catholic delegates are drawn into a realm that is almost as arcane and thick with secrets as the one they’ve left behind in Rome. Brannox lounges at its centre, apparently all-knowing and all-seeing. “He’s persuasive, seductive. He envelops you,” remarks the Holy See’s marketing chief Sofia (Cécile de France). “The man seems to be made of velvet.”