new boy movie review

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‘the new boy’ review: cate blanchett is the star but not the standout of warwick thornton’s striking drama about spiritual survival.

Gifted discovery Aswan Reid plays the title character, a First Nations Australian thrust from tribal life into the ordered 1940s world of a remote monastery orphanage run by a rule-breaking nun.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Its flaws, strangely enough, lie chiefly around the space given to Cate Blanchett (who’s also a producer, along with her husband, Andrew Upton) to dial up the feverish intensity as a renegade nun, who has kept quiet to authorities about the death of the elderly monk in charge and taken over running of the remote orphanage in 1940s regional Australia .

Fresh off her mercurial performance in Tár , Blanchett as always is a compelling, full-tilt performer and many audiences will want nothing less from her. But the spiral of Sister Eileen as the action progresses and she starts hitting the red wine, fearing the title character’s special magic and perhaps even questioning her faith, becomes almost a distraction from the more moving part of the story — the boy’s navigation of this unfamiliar world and its rules, attempting to find a place in it without surrendering his sense of himself.

Thornton’s script is as much at fault in this as anything Blanchett is doing in the role. There’s a nagging sense that the unnamed boy’s struggle, along with the theme of religious colonization and the monolithic force of Christianity imposed on Indigenous cultures, would work just as well with a white authority figure whose sanity wasn’t hanging in the balance.

Transported in a potato sack like the catch from a hunt, the “new boy,” as he becomes known, is dumped at a Benedictine monastery that serves as a mission for orphaned Indigenous children. The gruff delivery officer informs Sister Eileen only that the boy has no name and is a “bolter,” meaning likely to run away. But the nun brushes off the man’s contempt and goes about her business, allowing the new arrival to emerge from hiding and explore his new surroundings in his own time.

Rather than sleep on the dormitory bed he’s assigned, the new boy sleeps under it on the floor, amusing himself by rubbing his fingers together to create a sparkling ball of light that he later uses as a healing tool.

Two Indigenous adults help Sister Eileen manage the orphanage — a nun whose maternal nature earned her the name Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman) cooks and keeps house while farmhand George (Wayne Blair) runs the agricultural endeavors with the boys’ help. With minimal oversight and comfortable conditions, George says he’s “on a good wicket” and doesn’t want that jeopardized by the undisciplined new boy, who represents an ancient culture he has largely left behind.

The arrival of a valuable religious relic, a life-sized carved wooden crucifix sent from Europe to prevent it being damaged in the war, fascinates the new boy even before it’s hung above the church altar. But the child’s sudden fixation with the Christ figure yields confusion not only in him — he pierces his own hands with nails, stigmata-like, and brings snakes to the foot of the cross as an offering — but also to the increasingly overwrought Sister Eileen. Eventually, she turns to baptism as the path to salvation for the “lost boy.”

The ambiguous ending might leave some unsatisfied, but the story of the new boy’s spiritual power and the use of Christianity as a force to contain it is one of pathos and resilience. A remarkably promising young untrained actor, Reid shades his characterization with deep-rooted defiance as well as innocence, with wonder and instinctive distrust whenever his freedom is threatened. There are lovely moments in which The New Boy adopts a style akin to the simplicity and enchantment of children’s stories, qualities that seem to spring directly from its protagonist.

Blanchett brings welcome moments of levity as Sister Eileen becomes giddy with excitement about the crucifix, or when she ropes in Sister Mum to help act out an altercation behind closed doors with the deceased monk supposedly still in charge and now too addled with dementia to sign for the delivery. There’s an interesting duality about the character, solemnly intoning the Word of God one moment and then forging letters containing falsehoods to the government’s “Aboriginal Protector” the next. The problem is that there’s more than is necessary of Sister Eileen’s growing hysteria, which upsets the story’s balance.

That said, this is an original, ultimately affecting meditation on the battle to save souls, not as an act of holiness but one of oppressive control. Even when its storytelling occasionally falters, the visual power of Thornton’s gorgeous compositions — in the monastery’s chiaroscuro interiors as well as the sprawling landscapes in the northern part of South Australia, near the former mining town, Burra — remains transfixing.

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