Having cemented his status with 2017’s Sweet Country — a beguiling if sometimes schematic topography of race and coloniality in the outback — as a formidable voice for Indigenous Australian cinema, Warwick Thornton has returned with a film possibly even more enthralling and enigmatic. In The New Boy, the wider world takes a retreat from the worldly dominion of a remote monastery down south, where its inhabitants eschew the harsh and systematic hierarchy expected of their milieu for something more apparently tender. Serving as an orphanage mostly for Indigenous boys forcibly separated from their families (as part of the state’s insidious eugenics apparatus), the monastery is led de facto by Sister Eileen (an austere, if also luminous, Cate Blanchett), standing in for a deceased priest whose year-long absence has thus far been kept hidden from higher authorities. Into this sanctuary emerges a young, dark-skinned boy (Aswan Reid) with profuse blonde hair, entrusted by law enforcement to pastoral care for the sake of rehabilitation.
The unnamed boy had strangled a man, and his inherent savagery is compounded by the incomprehensibility of his actions. Neither verbal nor quite comprehending of polite and religious custom alike, he proves disruptive to the order laid out before him — a ragtag group of preteen boys fit into beige cloth and managed, discipline-wise, by the eldest of them. Yet against the headier impulses of moral didacticism, which constrained the expansive psyches of Sweet Country, Thornton here hovers between two ways of seeing. The first and more apparent one is the boy’s, as his acculturation into the monastery’s works and days remains stubbornly fraught with his secret past. This misrecognition of his new language and religion, possibly a refusal, possibly mere incapacity, in turn informs the apprehensions of his simple audience: a mix of fear and awe attends to his physical strength and ability to heal, and the nature of his arrival — whether divine, demonic, or simply an issue to be set straight — troubles both Sister Eileen and her two colleagues.
The New Boy invigorates largely because of this ambiguity, and its narrative restraint, though somewhat reliant on a quasi-magical register, does more to reflect the film’s metaphysical ambit than to obsess over realist intricacies. Set in the 1940s amidst Australia’s (unseen) entrance into the theatre of World War II, its storyline obliquely details the violent erosion of individual subjectivity, made less explicit and hence more insidious by the steady passage of monastic time. Wide-eyed and curious, the new boy experiences the recognizable emotions of reverence and indignation, and when confronted with a statue of the crucified Christ, these emotions are inverted, into physical distress for the latter’s stigmata and caring adoration of His body. The facticity of his own sorcery and seer-like vision is beside the point: what the film’s acerbically cheerful penultimate shot suggests, instead, is just how pervasively the colonial enterprise unfolds to strip away these visions. And although Thornton may have been more acclaimed for his brunt and brutal depictions of racism in Sweet Country, it’s the modernizing, reformist ideology in The New Boy that deserves better recognition for its vicious imprint on Australian history.
DIRECTOR: Warwick Thornton; CAST: Cate Blanchett, Aswan Reid, Deborah Mailman, Wayne Blair; DISTRIBUTOR: Vertical; IN THEATERS: May 23; STREAMING: ddd; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min.
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