Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy doesn’t walk through the door; it glides in on bare feet, candlelit and reverent, carrying with it the scent of eucalyptus, ash, and ancient sorrow. It’s a film with one foot planted in the red dust of colonial Australia and the other suspended in the mystical ether where faith, myth, and trauma collide.
At its core, The New Boy pulses with the quiet intensity of The Green Mile, not just in its narrative of an otherworldly figure arriving in a cloistered, racially charged institution, but in how it explores miracles as both awe-inspiring and threatening. The titular boy, mesmerizing, played by Aswan Reid, arrives at a Christian orphanage like a ghost from an older world. He doesn’t speak much, but his presence ripples through the atmosphere like a thunderstorm on the horizon. He glows from the inside, not in a cinematic trick, but in the way his silences speak louder than sermons.
Thornton, himself a Kaytetye man, doesn’t offer answers so much as provocations. Like his previous works, Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country, The New Boy is filled with silence and space. His camera lingers on faces, on hands, on the play of shadow and firelight. We are watching not a story unfold, but a mystery manifest. Every frame breathes with the reverence of a prayer and the ache of history.
“…a ghost from an older world…”
Cate Blanchett, one of our great intuitive actors and also serving as producer, plays the tortured Sister Eileen with a depth that could not have been scripted. She is both savior and oppressor, maternal and misguided. Her scenes with the boy, indeed all the boys in her care, are filled with yearning and discomfort, two worlds circling each other, unable to fully touch. Aswan Reid, meanwhile, conveys volumes with a glance. He is luminous, unknowable.
Thornton’s eye for elemental beauty hasn’t dulled. Light cuts through windows like divine intervention. Dust motes dance like spirits. Every shot feels kissed by eternity. But what elevates the film to near-transcendence is the score, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis at the peak of their austere powers. Their music doesn’t underscore scenes; it consecrates them. The strings ache, the drones haunt. There are stretches of the film where Cave and Ellis seem to whisper secrets to the land itself.
Still, don’t mistake this for a soft film. There’s anger here, coiled beneath the meditative rhythm—a deep fury at the theft of indigenous identity, at the absurd violence of forcing a child to bow to a nailed god while denying him his own sacred connection.
Thornton, like Frank Darabont before him, is interested in what can’t be explained. The New Boy doesn’t hand you meaning on a platter. It plants it like a seed and asks you to wait, to listen. Some films are not about what they are about, but how they are about it. The New Boy is exactly that, a film less concerned with plot than with presence. It’s not perfect, but it’s unforgettable. Call it a miracle, call it a parable, call it cinema that dares to believe.
"…Call it a miracle, call it a parable, call it cinema that dares to believe."
