Movie Review: THE NEW BOY

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: May 23rd, 2025 / 01:35 AM

THE NEW BOY movie poster | ©2025 Vertical Entertainment

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Cate Blanchett, Aswan Reid, Deborah Mailman, Wayne Blair
Writer: Warwick Thornton
Director: Warwick Thornton
Distributor: Vertical Entertainment
Release Date: May 23, 2025

THE NEW BOY is an odd film. On the one hand, it is filled with quiet and sincere wonder, delight and sorrow. It is a story of culture clash among individuals who don’t fit entirely into the worlds they come from, with a bit of magic. It is also convincingly measured in its depiction of life in an isolated Catholic orphanage in Australia during WWII and physically handsome to boot.

On the other hand, because of its deliberate pacing and the fact that both major characters remain mysterious throughout, for those who can’t embrace the film’s rhythms, THE NEW BOY feels slow.

A title card at the start tells us that, for most of the twentieth century, it was Australian policy to remove Aboriginal children from their homes and their families and put them in government schools.

While this is appalling and explains what some of the occupants of the orphanage may be doing there, it seems somewhat beside the point for the little boy (Aswan Reid) found alone in the Outback desert by military men on horseback.

We first meet the New Boy (as he comes to be called) besting the first soldier in a physical fight. Then the child is knocked unconscious by a boomerang thrown by a second soldier.

After it is determined that the boy doesn’t appear to be connected to any of the local tribes and speaks no English, he is sent to the orphanage presumably run by Dom (Father) Frederic.

What the authorities don’t know but we soon learn is that Dom Frederic died a year ago. Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett) has taken over running the orphanage, signing letters in the priest’s name and otherwise pretending he’s still around so that she can avoid having someone else come in and take over.

Sister Eileen even baptizes boys when they come of age, though since she’s not a priest, she confesses that she’s not sure this worked. She is an advocate for her charges, and the boys in her care seem reasonably happy under the circumstances.

The New Boy has never seen Catholicism (or much else of Euro/Australian society) before and starts coming to conclusions that make sense to him but may not be what Sister Eileen believes. The New Boy also has some uncommon abilities.

Director/writer Warwick Thornton is the director of photography here. His shooting style is intimate, whether he’s giving us close-ups of stigmata or wide golden vistas of grain fields stretching to the horizon.

Blanchett is spunky, passionate and eccentric all at once as Sister Eileen. Reid is profoundly magnetic as the somewhat otherworldly Boy. Deborah Mailman, as Eileen’s fellow nun, and Wayne Blair, as the non-clergy resident handyman are both solid.

The overall effect of THE NEW BOY is like that of a short story about an extraordinary incident that is better processed by the reader than the characters involved, since they lack an overview to give context to their experience. The material is clearly deeply felt by filmmaker Thornton. The tone lingers, even if it doesn’t translate to something readily engaging.

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