Warwick Thornton still remembers the first time he saw a crucifix. After a childhood as a mischief-maker in Alice Springs, he was exiled by his mother to a remote Western Australian town and sent to a boarding school run by Spanish Benedictine monks. It was there, aged 11, that he first walked into a church and came face-to-face with the gruesome effigy towering above him.
“[I remember] seeing this man being tortured up there,” the 52-year-old says. “And being incredibly scared and fearful.”
It’s an experience the Kaytetye film-maker describes now as “beautiful”. Both the beauty and brutality of religion find their place in his beguiling new feature, The New Boy. Set in 1940s Australia, the film opens with an unnamed Indigenous boy (newcomer Aswan Reid) being captured by authorities and transported – via hessian sack – to a remote Christian orphanage helmed by the flinty, sometimes deranged Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett, in her first on-screen feature role since Tár).
The second world war rages on in the distance but it is merely background noise to a tale of illusions and delusions guided by a rhythm that can often feel as elusive as religion itself. A streak of magical realism runs through the film: the new boy possesses mysterious healing powers that manifest as a flame twinkling around his hands. (While promoting his film, Thornton has cited an unlikely comparison: Tinkerbell.)
Thornton penned the first version of The New Boy script 18 years ago, long before his 2009 breakout film Samson and Delilah won him the prestigious Caméra d’Or prize at Cannes. In early iterations, the screenplay centred on an Indigenous boy and a white priest – a much more overt narrative of colonisation and its corrosive impacts. “It would have been very literal,” Thornton says. “Good this side, bad that side.”
The idea sat untouched for years. What began as a fiery tale based on Thornton’s own brush with Christianity eventually “started to die”, he says. “[The fire] became a little spark, became 90 pages in the bottom drawer, where the socks are. And then Cate came along.” Blanchett, sitting next to Thornton, lights up: “We kicked it around!”
The pair had long been in each other’s orbits but it wasn’t until the 2020 Berlin film festival that they met in person. Thornton was there for the second season of the outback crime series Mystery Road, which he co-directed with Wayne Blair (who plays the orphanage handyman in The New Boy). Blanchett was in Berlin promoting the Australian refugee drama Stateless, which she appears in and produced under her banner Dirty Films.
As lockdown set in, Thornton and Blanchett began talking – across continents, for hours, often late into the night. The New Boy was unearthed and the priest became a nun. “Initially, because it was written with a priest in mind, I just thought Dirty Films could be involved,” Blanchett says. “I wasn’t necessarily even thinking that I’d be acting in it.”
The decision to gender-flip the character breathed nuance into a dormant film. Unlike an imperious priest, Sister Eileen is sweary and salty, driven to frenzy by her fervour for Christ that borders on infatuation. In an early scene, a mass becomes a rambunctious singalong when she belts out a hymn at full volume for her audience of eight slightly bemused orphans. Later, when a long-awaited crucifix sculpture arrives, she gazes at the bare-chested Jesus like he’s a long-lost lover. “Oh, blessed father, he’s travelled a long way,” she whispers adoringly.
For all her spikiness, Sister Eileen injects a lightness into the film. So do the antics of the orphan boys and the sprawling landscapes of South Australia, where the film was shot – wheat fields as yellow as the new boy’s flaxen mop, often lit up by a golden-hour glow. “There’s a kind of buoyancy and an optimism, and an indefatigable quality about this boy’s spirit,” Blanchett says. She nods to Thornton: “Whereas I think if you’d made it 18 years ago, that spirit would have been extinguished.”
The lightness feels new for a film-maker whose best-known work has captured the harsh reality of Australia’s colonial past and present: Samson and Delilah’s unflinching depiction of poverty and addiction, or the 2017 western Sweet Country, a blood-soaked period piece following an Aboriginal farmhand on the lam after killing a lecherous white rancher.
There are certainly flickers of a more macabre film in The New Boy – snakes slithering around the place, a biblical fire that strikes the wheat fields. And on the face of it the setup brims with tragedy: an Indigenous boy being spirited away and indoctrinated into the church. “Saviour,” says Thornton, “is such a dangerous word – like ‘we got to save these children from the devil’.”
Even so, the violence is sublimated beneath the more immediate story of a clash of faiths. Can the new boy maintain his powers even as he’s confronted – and intrigued – by the shock of Christianity? Can Sister Eileen reconcile his abilities with her fanatical beliefs?
Above all, Thornton sees it as a film about survival. “Sister Eileen is trying to survive [too],” he says. “What this child is actually showing completely debunks so much that has been written for the last 2,000 years.”
Blanchett agrees: “We often think about organised religions, western religions, as being hermetically sealed and deeply incurious about other religions – in this case Indigenous spirituality. Where you find Sister Eileen … is at a place of great spiritual doubt, looking for a miracle. And to her surprise, the miracle comes in the form of a young man who she thinks, in a way: is this a black Christ?”
The New Boy, says Blanchett, is a chance to challenge the fixity of religious doctrines. “It’s quintessentially Australian in a lot of ways,” she says. “But it speaks to a larger universal struggle with certainty, uncertainty and doubt.”
The New Boy is released in Australian cinemas on Thursday
