The New Boy film review — Cate Blanchett stars in Australian magical-realist fable

Indigenous Australian director Warwick Thornton is known for two powerful dramas rooted in Aboriginal experience: the harshly street-smart Samson and Delilah and a superb Outback Western, Sweet Country. He returns with something odder and more delicate — The New Boy, a magical-realist fable about the encounter between two worlds.

Opening titles tell us about Australia’s former policy of “breeding out the black”, separating Indigenous children from their culture. The period is the 1940s, and one such child is brought forcibly to a secluded orphanage run by Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett). With his wide, contemplative eyes and a seraphic crop of golden hair, he is only ever known as “New Boy”.

The kid (Aswan Reid) turns out to have a strange power: he is attended by a little floating ball of flame that emerges from his hand. Soon, New Boy’s magic is confronted with the magic that Sister Eileen wants him to accept — in the form of a wooden Christ newly arrived from Europe. How New Boy responds leaves the nun in a state of spiritual disarray, clinging desperately to her belief and the bottle.

The New Boy has a fairly direct message to impart about the imposition of one culture on another, but conveys it with a teasing, often comical obliqueness that makes for an idiosyncratic energy. At times, that energy turns to awkward whimsy. Newcomer Reid radiates gauche charm and enthusiasm in a near-silent role, while Blanchett’s performance is all the more affecting in that Eileen is characterised not as a conventional authoritarian but as a tender, would-be tough matriarch manifestly crumbling on the inside.

Acting as his own director of photography, Thornton shoots the film magnificently — setting the enclosure of the orphanage’s dark-walled enclave against the vast, exposed terrain outside. This is an alluring, suggestive fable, but it never quite finds the artistic clarity to stand with Thornton’s best.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas now