Warwick Thornton’s latest film sure is a strange one. In sheer stylistic bravado The New Boy matches, and in some ways exceeds, the great auteur’s previous works, which include Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country. But driven by a desire for symbolic heft, The New Boy becomes a cryptic and borderline impenetrable noodle-scratcher stuffed full of heavy religious imagery. Reportedly inspired by Thornton’s own upbringing as an Aboriginal child attending a Christian boarding school, the film revolves around a young Aboriginal boy (Aswan Reid), known only by the titular description, who is seized by police in the 1940s and taken to an orphanage located in the back of beyond.
The boy’s supernatural powers – including the ability to heal wounds and create sparks of light from his hands – presumably mark a point of departure from Thornton’s life, but they are important to how the Kaytetye writer-director connects Aboriginal spirituality with Christian doctrine. What exactly the film says, means and stands for, however, are the $64,000 questions and very much open to debate. There are many provocative images: a winking statue of Jesus crucified, for instance, and occasions in which the “new boy” experiences stigmata. But Thornton revels in ambiguity and has no desire to provide viewers a clear pathway to understanding.
There’s nothing wrong with enigmatic films, like this one, that move like cloud formations in the sky, shifting patterns offering infinite scope for interpretation. And especially when those clouds are crafted by Thornton, a consummate stylist whose own superpower is conjuring ravishing cinematic images, as if by second nature. Such films can be thrillingly open-ended. But where these films can go wrong is when their images start to feel like they’re eclipsing the control of the creator, like the dancing brooms in Fantasia, or when provocation and abstruseness start to feel like the point. And there’s an element of that in The New Boy.
Among the film’s curiosities is a strange performance from Cate Blanchett (also on board as producer) as Sister Eileen, the nun running the orphanage; strange in that it doesn’t have a lot of impact. Perhaps we’ve become too accustomed to Blanchett dazzling us. Here, the way the film performs, its style, is much more powerful than her performance. Fragmentary opening shots, accompanied by a rousing score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, show the boy seized by police before being brought to Sister Eileen at the orphanage. The cleric in charge has recently died, but Eileen is concealing the news in order to run the place herself, with assistance from another nun, Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman) and a farmhand, George (Wayne Blair).
The unnamed boy is an aloof presence who initially draws a hostile response from other orphans, but they soon back off and give him space. (Never mess with the kid who has superpowers.) Storywise, not much happens. The film’s lack of momentum is coupled with strikingly beautiful shots (Thornton again serving as his own cinematographer) making it a prime choice for the descriptor “tone poem”, which is often code for “lacks narrative”. Interestingly, Thornton seems more interested in positioning the orphanage surreally than spatially. There were times when the location felt to me like something from Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds: a dreamlike edifice situated not on desert land per se but somewhere between wakefulness and sleep.
One actor punches through the film’s heavy style in the most magnetic of ways: the young and amazing Reid, delivering Australian cinema’s most impressive child performance for some time. The supporting cast are all fine: Mailman radiating warmth and Blair in quizzical mode, having the look of someone often bemused but rarely surprised. Blanchett’s performance picks up some traction when we truly grasp the dilemma Eileen faces: that the boy is beyond special, perhaps divine, a realisation she can’t reconcile with her faith.
Perhaps, come to think of it, this is the film’s core message: that Christian doctrine, or western religion more broadly, has no room to accommodate an understanding of Indigenous spirituality, forever relegating it to the realm of the other. But there isn’t one “right” reading of this film, that’s for sure; the search for meaning is, surely, the point.
The New Boy is released in Australian cinemas on Thursday
