‘The New Boy’ Review: Cate Blanchett Shines in a Gorgeous Tale of Faith, Identity, and Colonization

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May 24

**Courtesy of Vertical**- Cate Blanchett as Sister Eileen, Aswan Reid as New Boy

Warwick Thornton delivers a visually stunning meditation on spiritual resistance, cultural erasure, and the quiet power of innocence.

When stories of colonization are told, they often arrive wrapped in violence—overt, brutal, undeniable. What’s less frequently explored is the quieter, more insidious destruction: the kind masked as kindness. The New Boy, from acclaimed Indigenous Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton (Samson & Delilah), dares to examine this subtler violence with lyrical precision. The result is a film both enchanting and unsettling, as it invites viewers to sit with contradictions that have defined history itself.

Set in the 1940s in the vast outback of Australia, The New Boy follows a nameless Aboriginal child (Aswan Reid, in a mesmerizing debut) taken from his homeland and placed in a remote Christian orphanage. It’s a story inspired by generations of forced assimilation, reflecting the legacy of the Stolen Generations—a trauma still reverberating through Australia today. The orphanage, previously run by the late Father Dom Peter, has since fallen into the unorthodox care of Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett), a woman whose compassion often veers into complicity.

**Courtesy of Vertical-** Aswan Reid as New Boy

Sister Eileen, rebellious yet devout, is a woman caught between spiritual duty and colonial authority. Blanchett plays her with exquisite subtlety, resisting caricature in favor of emotional complexity. Eileen’s tenderness toward the boy is genuine, but her presence—and the system she upholds—is destructive. As she attempts to reconcile the boy’s otherworldly abilities with her Christian worldview, the orphanage itself becomes a battleground for belief and identity.

What truly elevates The New Boy is its rich visual storytelling. Thornton, also acting as cinematographer, composes every frame like a painting—scenes swathed in candlelight, wheat fields glowing gold, and dust floating in beams of sun. The Pietà-like image of Sister Eileen cradling the boy, the boy levitating amidst flying hay, the eerie prologue fight in the desert—each moment is imbued with myth and metaphor. This is a film where every image pulses with symbolic weight, capturing the tension between destruction and divinity.

But not all viewers will find its hypnotic pace accessible. The narrative unfolds slowly, eschewing conventional plotting for a more contemplative, slice-of-life structure. This can test one’s patience—especially when scenes stretch without dialogue or clear direction. Yet it’s within this silence that The New Boy speaks loudest, asking its audience to feel rather than decode. Thornton uses time as a tool of immersion, allowing the audience to experience the slow erosion of identity alongside his characters.

**Courtesy of Vertical**- Wayne Blair as George, Deborah Mailman as Sister Mum

The supporting cast plays their roles with quiet dignity. Deborah Mailman as Sister Mum brings a tender resilience, balancing warmth and weariness. Her restrained performance hints at a rich inner life shaped by years of compliance and loss. Her interactions with the boy and Sister Eileen reveal a deeper layer of complexity within the spiritual framework of the orphanage, subtly commenting on generational trauma and unspoken grief.

Thornton’s script leans heavily on archetypes. The children in the orphanage are mostly background noise. Even Reid’s titular character remains more symbol than individual, defined less by what he does than what he represents. Still, it works. Because The New Boy is not about character evolution, but about presence—about the quiet, unyielding truth of a boy whose spiritual identity refuses to be erased. The children around him mirror a chorus of assimilation, molded by the system that seeks to erase their roots.

Reid, in his first-ever role, is quietly extraordinary. With barely a word of dialogue, he communicates resistance, curiosity, and pain through nothing more than a glance. His magic—controlling light, dust, snakes—feels less like fantasy and more like ancestral memory. In his hands, spirituality is not performative; it is survival. His presence is a challenge to the institution’s rituals—a reminder of a truth far older and more rooted than the church walls around him.

Blanchett, meanwhile, builds a performance of contradictions. Sister Eileen is neither cruel nor innocent, but haunted—by belief, by doubt, and by the system she represents. She drinks in secret, swears under her breath, and grapples with a faith that crumbles the more she tries to reconcile it with the boy’s presence. Her conflict becomes the film’s moral and spiritual fulcrum, a test of whether kindness without understanding can still do harm.

Thematically, The New Boy is rich and resonant. It interrogates the myth of benevolent assimilation and the way religious institutions have masked cultural genocide behind robes of righteousness. Sister Eileen’s desire to help the boy is real—but in trying to mold him to fit her world, she erodes his own. The film is a study in how systems of power co-opt spirituality, and how Indigenous resistance persists in forms both seen and unseen.

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In lesser hands, these ideas might feel heavy-handed. But Thornton approaches them with a poetic, almost sacred reverence. His lens neither absolves nor condemns, instead leaving space for ambiguity. The final act—a sequence as tragic as it is transcendent—reminds us that some losses leave no blood, yet change everything. The crucifix and the crucified child become one image, and in doing so, confront the viewer with a history that cannot be easily resolved.

The New Boy may test your patience, but it rewards it with quiet revelations. Its slowness is deliberate, its silences sacred. Like the boy at its center, it asks you to listen—not just to what’s said, but to what lingers in the margins. This is a film that haunts softly and stays long after its final frame.

**Courtesy of Vertical**- Cate Blanchett as Sister Eileen

It’s not a conventional drama, nor is it pure fantasy. It is, like its protagonist, something else entirely—something ancient, sorrowful, luminous. Thornton doesn’t offer easy answers. But in The New Boy, he finds something rarer: the courage to let mystery speak for itself.

This is cinema not for the impatient, but for the introspective. It demands presence, contemplation, and an openness to ambiguity. In a time where movies are often expected to entertain above all else, The New Boy is a bold reminder that they can also invite reflection. The film doesn’t preach. It sits with you—and asks you to sit with it, to feel what cannot be spoken.

It leaves viewers not with resolution, but with a question: What is lost when faith becomes a tool of power, and who remains to carry the light when the world insists on darkness?