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‘the new boy’ review: cate blanchett is the star but not the standout of warwick thornton’s striking drama about spiritual survival.

Gifted discovery Aswan Reid plays the title character, a First Nations Australian thrust from tribal life into the ordered 1940s world of a remote monastery orphanage run by a rule-breaking nun.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Its flaws, strangely enough, lie chiefly around the space given to Cate Blanchett (who’s also a producer, along with her husband, Andrew Upton) to dial up the feverish intensity as a renegade nun, who has kept quiet to authorities about the death of the elderly monk in charge and taken over running of the remote orphanage in 1940s regional Australia .

Fresh off her mercurial performance in Tár , Blanchett as always is a compelling, full-tilt performer and many audiences will want nothing less from her. But the spiral of Sister Eileen as the action progresses and she starts hitting the red wine, fearing the title character’s special magic and perhaps even questioning her faith, becomes almost a distraction from the more moving part of the story — the boy’s navigation of this unfamiliar world and its rules, attempting to find a place in it without surrendering his sense of himself.

Thornton’s script is as much at fault in this as anything Blanchett is doing in the role. There’s a nagging sense that the unnamed boy’s struggle, along with the theme of religious colonization and the monolithic force of Christianity imposed on Indigenous cultures, would work just as well with a white authority figure whose sanity wasn’t hanging in the balance.

Transported in a potato sack like the catch from a hunt, the “new boy,” as he becomes known, is dumped at a Benedictine monastery that serves as a mission for orphaned Indigenous children. The gruff delivery officer informs Sister Eileen only that the boy has no name and is a “bolter,” meaning likely to run away. But the nun brushes off the man’s contempt and goes about her business, allowing the new arrival to emerge from hiding and explore his new surroundings in his own time.

Rather than sleep on the dormitory bed he’s assigned, the new boy sleeps under it on the floor, amusing himself by rubbing his fingers together to create a sparkling ball of light that he later uses as a healing tool.

Two Indigenous adults help Sister Eileen manage the orphanage — a nun whose maternal nature earned her the name Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman) cooks and keeps house while farmhand George (Wayne Blair) runs the agricultural endeavors with the boys’ help. With minimal oversight and comfortable conditions, George says he’s “on a good wicket” and doesn’t want that jeopardized by the undisciplined new boy, who represents an ancient culture he has largely left behind.

The arrival of a valuable religious relic, a life-sized carved wooden crucifix sent from Europe to prevent it being damaged in the war, fascinates the new boy even before it’s hung above the church altar. But the child’s sudden fixation with the Christ figure yields confusion not only in him — he pierces his own hands with nails, stigmata-like, and brings snakes to the foot of the cross as an offering — but also to the increasingly overwrought Sister Eileen. Eventually, she turns to baptism as the path to salvation for the “lost boy.”

The ambiguous ending might leave some unsatisfied, but the story of the new boy’s spiritual power and the use of Christianity as a force to contain it is one of pathos and resilience. A remarkably promising young untrained actor, Reid shades his characterization with deep-rooted defiance as well as innocence, with wonder and instinctive distrust whenever his freedom is threatened. There are lovely moments in which The New Boy adopts a style akin to the simplicity and enchantment of children’s stories, qualities that seem to spring directly from its protagonist.

Blanchett brings welcome moments of levity as Sister Eileen becomes giddy with excitement about the crucifix, or when she ropes in Sister Mum to help act out an altercation behind closed doors with the deceased monk supposedly still in charge and now too addled with dementia to sign for the delivery. There’s an interesting duality about the character, solemnly intoning the Word of God one moment and then forging letters containing falsehoods to the government’s “Aboriginal Protector” the next. The problem is that there’s more than is necessary of Sister Eileen’s growing hysteria, which upsets the story’s balance.

That said, this is an original, ultimately affecting meditation on the battle to save souls, not as an act of holiness but one of oppressive control. Even when its storytelling occasionally falters, the visual power of Thornton’s gorgeous compositions — in the monastery’s chiaroscuro interiors as well as the sprawling landscapes in the northern part of South Australia, near the former mining town, Burra — remains transfixing.

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The New Boy Reviews

There is an exceptional theme at the heart of The New Boy that is certainly touched upon, in often profound ways, but it isn’t explored as deeply as it absolutely could have been.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 5, 2024

There is no right way to interpret this film, and maybe that is what makes it so wonderful. The New Boy will open your mind and your heart, as you’re taken on a spiritual journey of an orphan and a nun navigating their beliefs.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 22, 2024

Many movies with religious themes often turn inwards...The New Boy instead takes it outward, offering a subtle, though no less powerful, battle of wills between Sister Eileen's Christianity and the New Boy's Indigenous beliefs.

Full Review | Jul 12, 2024

The New Boy is an important and impactful conversation starter that is not one to miss.

Full Review | May 10, 2024

It's not the film you think it's going to be. It's far more transcendent than that.

Full Review | Mar 19, 2024

... Viewers may find themselves having to ponder long and hard to figure out The New Boy’s layers of meaning.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 19, 2024

Where this story goes is fascinating and provocative, continually challenging the audience to consider the underlying ideas swirling around within the narrative.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 19, 2024

Cate Blanchett gives her first boring performance in Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 18, 2024

The New Boy fits a lifetime of questions into a short time, meaning not everything is explored to its fullest extent. Nevertheless, it’s a captivating story of faith and morality.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 18, 2024

The pacing is languid to a fault and it all gets rather bogged down in allegory.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 17, 2024

Impressive newcomer Aswan Reid is fantastic as the unnamed Aboriginal boy in this beautifully mounted fantasy drama from Warwick Thornton.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2024

A gentle, odd little Australian fable. Warwick Thornton’s film has a lot of thoughts to process, and while they don’t always cohere, the performances from Blanchett and Reid keep it interesting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 14, 2024

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.

Thornton has an opening half that’s stocked with surprises, and there’s Blanchett, who creates a fascinating journey of faith and survival in this unusual picture.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Feb 28, 2024

Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy puts on Cate Blanchett’s shoulders a story that wants to talk about so many things but ends up talking about none of them.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 26, 2023

This muddle of conflicting emotions is right in Blanchett’s wheelhouse; we feel her torment, even if neither we nor she can exactly put a name on it, because her body twists and hunches to tell the story.

Full Review | Oct 31, 2023

The New Boy is a film of deep, mystical qualities, and I can’t wait to revisit it.

Full Review | Oct 18, 2023

[Thornton's] film is gorgeous throughout but loses a bit of its power in a back half that seems uncertain of the story it’s telling.

Full Review | Sep 15, 2023

A rich and majestic film that proves that Warwick Thornton engages profoundly with indigenous issues and the long stain of colonialism. The New Boy is a strange and hypnotic enchantment.

Full Review | Sep 6, 2023

With his oh-so-perceptive eye, Thornton's visuals stunningly do what New Boy does: expresses everything with little speaking necessary.

Full Review | Jul 22, 2023

‘The New Boy’ Review: Cate Blanchett Returns to Australia For an Eerie, Atmospheric Clash of Faiths

Taken into a monastery orphanage in 1940s Australia, a young Aboriginal boy's spirituality meshes uneasily with Christian doctrine in Warwick Thornton's ambitious, visually lustrous fable.

By Guy Lodge

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With war raging abroad and the monastery’s presiding monk having recently died, Sister Eileen does her best to avoid attracting the patriarchal interventions of the Church, with the assistance of two Aboriginal colleagues: fellow nun and matron figure Sister Mum (a wonderful Deborah Mailman) and burly farmhand George (Wayne Blair). That enables a more permissive environment than you might expect in such an institution — she doesn’t share the late monk’s taste for corporal punishment, for one thing — so the ungentrified behavior of the new arrival, who can’t speak English, eats with his hands and sleeps under his bed rather than on it, isn’t immediately disciplined.

But, dutiful nun that she is, Sister Eileen is big on religious conversion. And in this regard, the new boy — who may have uncanny spiritual powers of his own, as he sparks light from his fingertips and appears to heal wounds with his touch — presents more challenges than most. He’s not unreceptive to the concept of Jesus: When a large, ornately carved crucifix arrives at the chapel from France, for safekeeping during the Nazi invasion, he physically embraces the icon as eagerly as he does a tree in his natural habitat. But the good Sister, while well-meaning to a point, isn’t imaginative enough to see the parallels or commonalities between his belief system and hers, and can’t conceive of Indigenous spirituality and devout Christianity co-existing in one mind: The former must be quashed for the latter to take root, even at the expense of potential miracle-working.

The battle of wills and faiths that ensues is gradual and sometimes unspoken. Thornton is less interested in fire-and-brimstone showdowns than in a more quietly pervasive air of unease around the unfamiliar, with Sister Mum and George understanding more than they let on about the other world suddenly in their midst. Thornton sometimes underlines the historical and allegorical resonances of this strange duel with too heavy a hand, though there’s deft, witty symbolism here too: The new boy’s first baptism comes not with holy water but with stinging sheep dip for head lice, an animal treatment for an intruder not yet accepted into the human flock.

Nearly all grande dames of the screen must play a nun at some point in their careers, and Blanchett tackles this thespian rite with gusto, finding all manner of humanizing eccentricities in Sister Eileen’s assertive gait, quizzical gaze and pinched, tremulous preaching style. The star’s undimmed magnetism as a performer occasionally threatens to distract from the plainer ideological matters at hand — or it might if Reid weren’t her contrasting match in that department, as silent and penetratingly watchful as she is fretfully busy. With an intense, genuinely unworldly presence that never lapses into fey savant cliché, he asserts a point of view on his scenes that makes credible even some challenging swerves into fantastical terrain.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard), March 18, 2023. Running time: 116 MIN.

• Production: (Australia) A Screen Australia presentation in association with Fremantle, Longbridge, South Australian Film Corporation, Screen NSW. (World sales: Veterans, Los Angeles.) Producers: Kath Shelper, Andrew Upton, Cate Blanchett, Lorenzo De Maio. Executive producers: Gretel Packer, Coco Francini. Co-producer: Georgie Pym.
• Crew: Director, screenplay, camera: Warwick Thornton. Editor: Nick Meyers. Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis.
• With: Aswan Reid, Cate Blanchett, Deborah Mailman, Wayne Blair, Shane McKenzie-Brady, Tyrique Brady, Laiken Beau Woolmington, Kailem Miller, Kyle Miller, Tyzailin Roderick, Tyler Rockman Spencer.

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

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The New Boy

A nine-year-old Aboriginal Australian orphan boy arrives in the dead of night at a remote monastery run by a renegade nun. A nine-year-old Aboriginal Australian orphan boy arrives in the dead of night at a remote monastery run by a renegade nun. A nine-year-old Aboriginal Australian orphan boy arrives in the dead of night at a remote monastery run by a renegade nun.

• Warwick Thornton
• Cate Blanchett
• Deborah Mailman
• 20 User reviews
• 30 Critic reviews
• 62 Metascore
• 7 wins & 26 nominations

Top cast 22

• Sister Eileen

• (as Shane McKenzie-Brady)
• (as Tyler Rockman Spencer)
• (as Laiken Beau Woolmington)
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• Trivia Actress Cate Blanchett is a producer on this picture which was filmed in South Australia (S.A.). Her first starring role in a theatrical feature film was Parklands (1996) which was also shot in S.A. about just over 25 years earlier. One other person worked on both of these productions. This was her husband, Andrew Upton , who performed duties in the capacities of continuity on Parklands (1996) and producing on 'The New Boy'.

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• Runtime 1 hour 56 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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The New Boy

Colonial forces seek to stamp out Aboriginal spirituality in Warwick Thornton’s haunting outback fable

Time Out says

There’s a kinetic strength to star-in-the-making Aswan Reid’s screen presence as we first glimpse his unnamed ‘new boy’ attempting to throttle the life out of a policeman much bigger than himself. A scrapper with a mess of sun-bleached hair, he seems to channel the vast majesty of the mountainous desert as they tussle in the dust. In The New Boy, filmmaker Warwick Thornton’s latest reckoning with Australia’s violent history, this is a fight the boy can’t win. Forcibly knocked out by a boomerang in a cracking shot that feels like it’s going to rip through the screen, he’s dragged in a sack to a ramshackle orphanage ruled over by Cate Blanchett’s ocker nun, Sister Eileen, sometime during World War II. Covering up the death of the priest who should be in charge, she’s a little too fond of communion wine and fervent prayer. Wreaking a matriarchal variant of paternalism no less insidious for its well-meaning façade, she hopes to scrub out the young Aboriginal man’s spiritual connection to the land and imprint the Catholic faith on him, all blood and thorns. Reid conveys great interior strength as the new boy plays with a mysterious fire dancing around his fingertips under his steel-framed bed in a dormitory full of similarly lost (or stolen) boys. With a child’s wisdom, he can’t quite figure out why anyone would leave the nails dug deep into the wooden wounds of Jesus on the chapel’s cross. Wayne Blair’s groundskeeper George, also a First Nations man, is unnerved by the new boy clinging fiercely to the ways he has long-since abandoned. Watching the lad shadow box in the stables and hearing a snatch of Indigenous language, George mutters, ‘You’re very far from home.’ A truth twice over.

There’s a kinetic strength to star-in-the-making Aswan Reid’s presence 

There’s sadness, too, in the excellent Deborah Mailman’s Sister Mum and her unspoken grief, frozen in the silver of a framed photograph by her bed. Filmed by Thornton (who serves as cinematographer too) like a sunbeam through honey, The New Boy is steeped in the majesty of nature. One perfect shot dwarfs Sister Eileen and the boy in a forced perspective in which a workhorse appears even more gigantic. And while the religious symbolism of lightning-struck bushfires and coiling grass snakes is overt, it works within this tale of colonial erasure. The haunting pace rocks the viewer into a meditative state, as does a lulling score by Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis and Nick Cave. When two paths are presented in the closing moments, you might find yourself willing there was another way for the future of this country. In UK cinemas Mar 15.

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• Director: Warwick Thornton
• Screenwriter: Warwick Thornton
• Cate Blanchett
• Wayne Blair

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‘The New Boy’ Review: Warwick Thornton and Cate Blanchett Find Magic in This Spiritual Fairy Tale

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The spark of life that gave Warwick Thornton what is now “The New Boy” took 18 years to flicker, and then fully glow. The Australian filmmaker looked to his own childhood, raised by monks, to find the spiritual fairy tale that now manifests via the film ’s eponymous Aboriginal child in a sweeping and poetic portrait of stifled faith and the threat of monopoly on religion. 

He is simply known as the New Boy, a nameless Aboriginal boy (a breakout turn from Aswan Reid, almost completely silent but beguiling) welcomed in by Sister Eileen ( Cate Blanchett ) at her fiercely protective remote monastery. It’s 1940s Australia in the middle of World War II, and the New Boy is captured by a horseback police patrol and dumped with Sister Eileen. But she does and will care for him — her faith is religious but also transcendent when it comes to her small group of boys. She works  with  the Church, but ultimately for those she cares for. 

That includes two Aboriginal staff, George (Wayne Blair) and Sister Mum (prolific Australian TV actress and emotive standout Deborah Mailman) who, with Sister Eileen, nurture the next generation while reconciling multiple schools of thought in the name of survival. But Thornton often lenses the film with great beauty (acting as DoP as well as writer and director, alongside Jules Wurm as camera operator), as much in wide-open vistas of the wild bush in the wind as the fragility of a fly landing on Sister Eileen’s eyelid as she awakens from a nap. The world is harsh, challenging, but there is poetry in the hope that things can still grow and become beautiful. 

Everything changes for the New Boy — and for Sister Eileen — when a life-size carving of Christ on the cross arrives. Everybody knows what it means, but the New Boy doesn’t. He sees things the others don’t, and Reid’s angelic innocence is hypnotic to follow. He eventually manages two words after spending some time feeling his way through these things everybody seems to believe in: “Slut” and “Amen.” But the words don’t matter — his spark does. Thornton injects a childlike sense of wonder with literal glimmers of light, magic realism making its way into this stark, severe environment. Because when you’re a kid, out in a bold new world, it’s all you have. 

The New Boy sees things in Christ that only he can. There’s movement — in his chest, his sighing eyebrows, in droplets of blood making a splash on the floor that nobody else can feel. It’s like nothing Sister Eileen has ever experienced, which pushes Blanchett’s own performance to extremes that the likes of Lydia Tár would shudder at. There’s deep emotion and vulnerability in Blanchett’s work, with its performance counteracting the New Boy’s calm and comfortable otherness with an almost overbearing dedication to care. 

But then whatever seems like it’s taking us down a path shifts — and the spark is out. And even then, all is not lost (how could it ever be, with “Sing Sing Sing” by Benny Goodman just entering the show). The New Boy may have entered the community somewhat, changed paths just a little, but Sister Eileen’s community is entirely different than what it once was. Christianity must make room for Aboriginal spirituality, and all other schools of thought in the world we live in, full of new boys. That Thornton has found a language to tell this loud, and find magic in it, could be a tiny miracle in itself. 

Grade: B+ 

“The New Boy” premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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‘The New Boy’ Review: Cate Blanchett Drama Delivers an Unsettling Blend of Religion and Magic

Cannes 2023: Director Warwick Thornton, with help from Blanchett as actor and producer, tells a mystical story that ties into shameful Australian history

For about half an hour or so, Warwick Thornton’s “The New Boy” could almost fool you into thinking that it’ll be a gentle, evocative and beautifully atmospheric movie about a small group of people who mean well. But then things change, and an understated film that might have quietly dealt with Australia’s original sin – the decades-long removal of indigenous children from their parents – turns complex, spiritual and surpassingly unsettling, a mixture of religion and magic that doesn’t really trust in either.

It’s still beautifully composed, but it cuts that beauty with some thorny ideas and puzzling turns; it starts out beguiling, but it may end up getting under your skin.

Best known for “Samson and Delilah,” which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009, Warwick has largely been working in television since then, with the notable exception of 2017’s “Sweet Country,” which looked at the conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people. “The New Boy” brings him back to the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, where “Samson and Delilah” also screened — but this time he brought along Cate Blanchett, a fan turned collaborator who plays a nun and also served as a producer on the film.

Set in an Australian frontier of desert and dry grass, it brings sometime cinematographer Thornton’s remarkable eye to the story of a young Aboriginal boy who’s brought to an out-of-the-way home for “lost boys” run by a pair of nuns and a kindly handyman/farmer. 

The setup is, of course, disquieting, given Australia’s decades-long history of removing indigenous children from their families to “assimilate” them into white society. But in this desolate environment, a community of people who care can be a refuge — especially since the film is set during World War II, when even young teenagers were in danger of being pulled into the military. 

The refuge, such as it is, is overseen by Sister Eileen, a seemingly kindly nun who acts for all appearances like a male cleric: She gives the sermons, leads the prayers and even does baptisms. We gradually learn that’s because the monk who used to be in charge has died after a spell with dementia that left him abusive and profane, and Sister Eileen figures it’d be OK with God if she performs some priestly duties rather than risk losing the support of the officials who send boys to her, and at times receive young men to use in the war effort.

(Sister Eileen does, however, confess her little lies and subterfuges — to the empty chair where the priest used to sit.)

A young Aboriginal boy (magnetic newcomer and first-time actor Aswan Reid) is brought to her door by local law enforcement, and from the start the nameless child has little interest in assimilation. He sleeps on the floor under his bed, doesn’t wear a shirt or shoes, eats with his hands and virtually never speaks. Told he needs a name, Sister Eileen shrugs it off and says, “I’ll just call him New Boy.” 

But New Boy, it turns out, is resistant to adopting new customs but fascinated by new religion. “Amen” is probably the word he deploys most regularly, while he’s as excited as Sister Eileen when she takes delivery of a life-sized crucifix for the chapel. Transfixed by every detail of a Jesus carved out of dark wood the color of his own skin, he almost immediately develops stigmata, bleeding from both palms.

George the handyman (Wayne Blair) eyes New Boy warily and walks out of the dining room when he shows up. “I know what the boy is,” he says ominously without specifying exactly what that might be. The other nun, dubbed “Sister Mum” by the boys who don’t have mothers of their own (Deborah Mailman), is more accommodating, but she’s clearly got secrets of her own: On her bedside table, Sister Mum keeps a photo of herself with her two daughters — and judging from her tears as she looks at the photo, her children were part of the so-called Stolen Generations, the indigenous children taken from their families from the early 1900s into the 1970s.

If George knows “what the boy is,” the audience is less certain. New Boy has the stigmata, but he also has a way with snakes, and he seems to conjure up sparks swirling around his fingers at essential times. He may have healing powers or he may not, and the connection between his Jesus obsession and his extraordinary abilities is never clear. Sister Eileen, meanwhile, slips into near hysteria herself, and things start feeling downright apocalyptic when a wildfire burns out on the horizon.

Without losing control of the material, Thornton lets things build to an unholy frenzy of sorts, or maybe it’s a holy frenzy. Youthful passions stirred up by religion have been a cinematic staple since long before “Carrie,” but “New Boy” finds a new spin by mixing it with a country’s history of oppression. 

There’s not a lot of clarity here, but there is a terrible, strange beauty in the film’s mixture of ritual, magic, faith and the dark side of colonialism. By the end New Boy has a name, but his identity remains elusive.

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From white folks’ point of view, the New Boy (Aswan Reid, a largely wordless but electric presence) is simply feral. George (Wayne Blair), the mission’s laconic Aboriginal handyman, says darkly that he knows what that boy is. We never really do. We just see a small, slight, elfin lad who sleeps on the ground and can catch snakes in his hands. He can also hit his fellows with a strength that seems superhuman, can calm another boy’s fever with his breath and has a strange ability to generate a darting light with a snap of his fingers. His sheer otherness lies beyond the compass of Sister Eileen’s pragmatic faith, a working muscle exercised as love for the boys in her charge and a tremendous ability to get things done. 

RELATED:  Cannes Film Festival 2023 In Photos

George isn’t going to betray her. “I’m on a good wicket here,” he tells the New Boy, sharing a smidgeon of his private stash of marmalade. “Don’t stuff it up for me.” Neither will Sister Mum, who cooks, scolds and loves the boys who have no mother – or no acknowledged mother – of their own. A photograph of her own children sits by her bed, where she can weep over it in private. Mailman, always an actor of tremendous warmth, is heart-breaking here.

But Sister Eileen is also a woman of a strong, straightforward belief. When she finds the New Boy seems to have developed stigmata, however obviously self-administered in a show of empathy with the crucified Christ hanging on the wall of their chapel, she is confused, thrilled, overwhelmed and somehow angry. She ordered the Crucifix herself and was beyond excited when it arrived, telling the boys shyly that some people claimed it could work miracles. She longs for a miracle. But does anyone really want to deal with miracles, let alone a Second Coming? What she really wants is to get in the olive harvest. This muddle of conflicting emotions is right in Blanchett’s wheelhouse; we feel her torment, even if neither we nor she can exactly put a name on it, because her body twists and hunches to tell the story. For a woman who has given herself to the Lord, Sister Eileen is vigorously physical. Her history is written on her body.

In this crucible, Thornton plays out the conflict of two spiritualities as well as two ways of life, embodied in this sliver of a boy. This is not just a film about a boy with magical fingers. Nor is it a film for people who cringe at the mention of religion or who regard faith in a god as risible; the film is not a declaration of belief, but it does take belief seriously. With few words, Thornton layers complex metaphysical ideas that can never be resolved. 

The New Boy sees the eyes of the statue blink and, somehow, Sister Eileen knows he sees something. One night, she finds him halfway up the Crucifix, clinging to the wooden figure in a koala hug. She has seen him do the same to a tree. How can it be that his punctured hands heal inexplicably overnight?  

As a Catholic, she believes in a supernatural world: “All things visible and invisible,” as the Creed says. Just not these invisible things: they don’t belong here. Except, of course, that they are what truly belong, embedded in the land and its people. It is the Australian tragedy – the tragedy of all conquered Indigenous peoples – brought to life in miniature against the divine backdrop of this dry, glorious country. 

Title:  The New Boy Festival:   Cannes ( Un Certain Regard ) Director-screenwriter:  Warwick Thornton Cast:  Aswan Reid, Cate Blanchett, Deborah Mailman, Wayne Blair Running time:  1 hr 56 min Sales agent:  The Veterans

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Cate Blanchett is the star, but first-time actor Aswan Reid shines

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THE NEW BOY ★★★★

(M) 116 minutes

One message of Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy is not to leap to conclusions about what you’re dealing with. That seems like the best approach in addressing the film itself, in all ways sufficiently out of the ordinary that usual standards of judgment scarcely apply.

Cate Blanchett plays Sister Eileen in The New Boy, directed by Warwick Thornton.

Thornton has said the script draws on his own unhappy experiences as a Kaytetye boy from Alice Springs, from where he was sent at age of 11 to a Western Australian boarding school run by Benedictine monks. But this is not a realistic film, but a fable, with echoes of numerous earlier stories told in Australian cinema, though not so often by Indigenous directors.

The setting is outback Australia during the Second World War, the same period as Baz Luhrmann’s Australia ; the unnamed boy of the title is an Indigenous boy played with what appears to be a total lack of artifice by first-time actor Aswan Reid.

Captured by the authorities, he’s left at a tin-roofed orphanage that’s run by the sturdy Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett, also a producer) with a couple of Indigenous offsiders – a nun known as Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman) and hired hand George (Wayne Blair).

Wayne Blair (left) as George and Aswan Reid as The New Boy.

He’s a mystery, this boy, to his new caregivers and to us. We see the intelligence and curiosity in his roaming gaze, but can only occasionally guess at his thoughts. For quite a long way into the film he doesn’t speak, which might lead us to suppose he’s mute, or has no language of his own.

Neither assumption proves correct, but the boy remains an outsider, whatever efforts are made to bring him into the fold. He opts to sleep beneath the bed rather than on top of it; he looks on patiently while Sister Mum mimes how to use the outdoor dunny, but it isn’t his way.

He’s also a golden boy, literally and otherwise: his yellow hair is the colour of the surrounding wheat fields, so he could duck into them and hide forever. He knocks out a bully with a single blow, and from a Christian perspective could be called a miracle worker, though the label may not really be the right one. “I know what that boy is,” George says eventually. But he doesn’t spell it out.

Sister Eileen has her own complexities (not that Sister Mum or George are simpler, although this again is a conclusion we might jump to). The danger here is that Blanchett’s star presence might overpower everything else; at the same time, the film couldn’t possibly be what it is without her.

None of the cliches about repressed or neurotic nuns apply: where the new boy is largely silent, all the layers of Sister Eileen’s character are audible in her voice, which is bright and brisk in the manner of those accustomed to talking to children, but also carries the down-to-earth assurance of someone who enjoys being a leader and does it well.

The core of what happens in The New Boy could have been told much more briefly, and its meaning, taken allegorically, is clear to the point of starkness. But the real drama is in Thornton’s style, always lyrical but never fluidly so: smoothness in this context would be impossible, since we’re never comfortably aligned with any one character.

Nor can we easily judge what perceptions they might share, any more than Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ sometimes too-richly orchestrated score binds everything together, or Blanchett, for all her virtuosity, is allowed to take full command. The New Boy is the story of an encounter, but one which in a sense never quite happens. What Thornton appears to be telling us is that the gaps remain.

The New Boy is in cinemas from June 6.

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Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy delivers a story of Indigenous power and wonder

Source: Roadshow Films

The dramatic opening filmed on stony ground near Burra in South Australia has the titular new boy (Aswan Reid) choking the life out of a white policeman who he climbs onto like a deranged zombie.

They are unequal in size but the boy has supernatural strength and walks away, only to be felled by an incoming boomerang.

Which is how he comes to be delivered in a sack in the 1940s to an isolated outback monastery where the head nun, Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett), is in the fervid throes of a religious quest whose purpose she has never found.

For reasons not made clear, Sister Eileen and her offsider Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman), who care for homeless boys, are happy to let the new boy wander around undisciplined, like a rescued puppy.

“It’s the pecking order,” Sister Eileen says indulgently, as one of her other charges comes to grief. Only the monastery manager George (Wayne Blair) has his hackles up: He is on a good wicket on a property that yields olives and grain and is not about to let a newcomer mess it up.

This strange and often silent film has moments of magic and majesty underpinned by a dark and swirling score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Mailman gives another strong performance as Sister Mum. Photo: Roadshow Films

But supporting these sublime moments are a series of undeveloped ideas: Things touched on and then left, started but not finished.

The priest running the monastery has died and the nuns don’t want anyone finding out. But why? There seems little to hide as they teach the boys faith and send them out into the world.

Thornton is a masterful filmmaker whose 2017 feature,  Sweet Country , was a tragic Indigenous western while his 2021 screen series,  Firebite , gave us an engaging splatter fest about Indigenous vampires defending their turf – it was filmed in Coober Pedy – against an invasion of zombies. As an analogy of colonial occupation, it was brilliant, and it was fun.

Here, Blanchett is jumpy, febrile and weepy as the deluded nun looking for whatever miracle she can latch onto while Reid is magnificent – he carries the story in his tough little body.

Blanchett’s Sister Eileen is seemingly looking for a miracle. Photo: Roadshow Films

But it feels like a film that needed more thought and a stronger, cohesive narrative that justified its almost two-hour run time.

The ending – which is overlong and obsessed with stigmata – is ripe with analogy: A story of Indigenous power and wonder curbed and destroyed by smiling missionaries who made their flock seek refuge in a god they did not understand.

As The New Boy  reminds us, Indigenous people already had rich creation stories of their own.

This article first appeared in InReview . Read the original here.

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The New Boy Review

As an Australian Aboriginal child, Warwick Thornton was sent to a Christian boarding school, run by monks and nuns. That formative experience inspired The New Boy , the filmmaker’s seventh feature — but don’t expect a straightforward slice of direct autobiography. It is a curious confection, with a tone that flits between a serious study of colonialism and religion, and something more fantastical or supernatural. It even has an unexpected Weekend At Bernie ’s -esque subplot. And it isn’t the sort of film to leave you with easy answers.

Cate Blanchett — in her first Australian role in several years — plays Sister Eileen, the leader of a Catholic mission in Australia’s Northern Territory. After the supreme, overbearing confidence of her performance in 2022’s Tár , there’s a fascinating nervous energy to Eileen: seemingly as fearful of her faith as she is beholden to it. She is naive and misguided but also quietly cunning, signing letters of official business ‘Don Peter’, after the now-dead patriarch of the mission, and pretends to be him for the benefit of delivery men. Even when the character feels occasionally underwritten, Blanchett is — of course — never less than compelling.

It is a deeply Australian story, rooted in its shameful history

The nuns’ mission’s delicate equilibrium is thrown off-balance when the unnamed new boy arrives, and Thornton conjures a wonderfully unguarded performance out of newcomer Aswan Reid, who moves about the world as scruffily and messily as his curly blond locks. He is a ball of energy and innocence, and the film plays through his lively eyes, almost as if it’s an unorthodox coming-of-age story. A magical spark of light follows the new boy, implying healing powers, with a lens flare that recalls a 1980s Amblin adventure; elsewhere, Thornton’s camera feels almost Terrence Malick-ian, taking full advantage of the dusty desert sunrises.

There is a deep, abiding spirituality to the film, and Thornton seems to draw a line of comparison between Christian mysticism and the Earth-centred ‘geosophical’ Aboriginal belief systems: are the two traditions not so different, after all? Or are they wholly incompatible? It’s not clear what position the film is taking, an ambiguity that can feel confounding. Instead, Thornton luxuriates in studious, slow-burn pacing, too often seemingly just treading water.

What feels clear, though, is the deliberate setting of this tale in time and place. It is a deeply Australian story, rooted in its shameful history (the new boy is snatched against his will, a symptom of the country’s racist assimilation laws) and the eventual imposition of a Western name on him feels symbolic, the loss of innocence and identity. The New Boy ’s ruminations don’t always connect, but it does make us wonder whose souls really need saving.

The New Boy Review: Violence and Beauty Abound in Warwick Thornton's Latest Film [TIFF 2023]

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No matter where you may fall on the spectrum of faith, it cannot be denied that religion — Christianity, in particular, as is the subject of The New Boy — can be equally beautiful and frightening. On one hand, there's something inspiring about the way in which faith can be used as a guiding principle for kindness, a means of fostering community, and a way of making sense of the world. On the other hand, of course, we have seen across history — and currently are seeing — the weaponization of religion, with faith becoming a source of justification for violence (whether physical or through dangerous rhetoric).

With The New Boy , which makes its North American premiere at TIFF , Kaytetye filmmaker Warwick Thornton turns his lens on Australia's own history of colonization. Set in the 1940s, we follow as an Aboriginal boy, known only as "the New Boy" (Aswan Reid), is taken by the police to a secluded monastery that fosters abandoned children. It is run by Sister Eileen, played by Cate Blanchett, who also serves as co-producer under her company Dirty Films . Sister Eileen leads the shelter with care and devotion, resolute in her mission to baptize the boys into Christianity.

The New Boy, however, presents an interesting case for Sister Eileen, her assistant Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman) and the groundskeeper George (Wayne Blair). Though he seems inclined to stay and is intrigued by the goings-on of the monastery — an ornate crucifix in their church especially grabs his attention — the New Boy refuses to adopt the teachings being thrust upon him. Things escalate when the New Boy demonstrates magical abilities that, to Sister Eileen, confirm her own religious beliefs.

A Visually Stunning Film That Houses a Violent Story

The New Boy is a gorgeous film, one of the most visually stunning at the festival and shot by Thornton himself, who pulls triple duty here as writer, director, and cinematographer. Often shooting long and wide, we're able to take in the splendor of the Australian landscape. The sound team, consisting of Will Sheridan and Liam Egan, is a luxury here; the rustling of the leaves in the crop fields, the crunch of the gravel, and the flickering of the New Boy's magic (which takes the form of a firefly-like spark) all bring out the wonders of the natural land.

Inside the church and the monastery, brought to life with a mix of reverence and horror by production designer Amy Baker, Thornton plays heavily with light and shadows, often evoking past religious iconography, like Michelangelo's Pietà , in which Mary cradles the body of Christ after he is taken down from the cross. In a way, this brews the unstated conflict between Sister Eileen and the New Boy: when we're outside in nature, we bask in its awe through the New Boy's eyes, but, inside, where Sister Eileen is in charge, we move between his perspective and hers, and through the latter, we see her and her mission as she sees herself: a grueling work of art in the name of the Lord.

Related: Lee Review: Kate Winslet Is Perfect in WWII Drama About the Need for Objective Truth [TIFF 2023]

Many movies with religious themes often turn inwards, whether it's a sole character going through a crisis of faith or embarking upon a journey within a religious sect. However, The New Boy instead takes it outward, offering a subtle, though no less powerful, battle of wills between Sister Eileen's Christianity and the New Boy's Indigenous beliefs. What's more, there's a poignancy with which Thornton's film sits at the intersection of these two systems of faith. There's a scene in which the New Boy heals one of the children after he is badly injured, doing so without hesitation, which speaks to his inherent sense of kindness and community (coincidentally, two principles Sister Eileen aims to instill in the boys).

The tragedy is when Christianity tries to overtake the other. This is when the violence in The New Boy starts to expose the underbelly of Sister Eileen's otherwise altruistic intentions. Whether it's her stomping on the heads of harmless snakes the New Boy innocently brings into the church or him piercing his own palms with a wrought-iron nail (in front of the crucifix no less), there's a steady yet visceral quality to the way Thornton allows the violence to unfold. That is, after all, how indoctrination works, coerced and otherwise.

Related: The Holdovers Review: One of the Best Movies of the Year [TIFF 2023]

An Incredible Debut Performance from Aswan Reid

The New Boy effectively presents another incredible performance from Blanchett . As Sister Eileen, she runs the gamut from determined and tortured, devoted to her mission and enthralled by the New Boy's presence, but at the same time, there are flickers of doubt in her. She's fearful of what the New Boy presents in terms of how he disrupts everything she has built and known in the monastery, and yet there's a sparkle in her eye from how he, at the same time, confirms the faith she has promised herself to after all this time. Predominantly dressed in — perhaps, more appropriately, confined to — her religious habit, Blanchett invites both derision and sympathy.

That said, The New Boy certainly belongs to Reid. He only ever repeats one word throughout the film — "Amen" — but he brings an astonishing depth to the New Boy that his silence speaks louder than anything anyone else says. Fearless and precocious, Reid goes toe-to-toe against Blanchett, lending a tenderness and, in some scenes, a much-needed levity to the film. This is only his first movie, but his talent promises a bright future ahead.

For more information about The New Boy or the film festival, visit the TIFF website .

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Movies, tv & music • authentic indie film criticism • forming the future • est. 2014 • rt-approved 🍅, london film festival review: warwick thornton’s ‘the new boy’.

Vague Visages’ The New Boy  review contains minor spoilers. Warwick Thornton’s 2023 movie features Cate Blanchett, Aswan Reid and Deborah Mailman. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews , along with cast/character summaries , streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings .

The main reason Christianity is the most widely-practiced religion across the world is due to colonialism. The dominant religion of Europe easily became the dominant religion of the Americas , Africa and Oceania when European invaders arrived, bringing not just violence and technology, but also a new theology and a new system of beliefs.

Whether new converts brought into Christianity because of convenience or sincere beliefs in its teachings is, obviously, a much trickier question to answer, with a wide degree of variance from person to person, group to group. Today,  many folks from groups determined to be the “Other” by Christian missionaries are now deeply fervent in their beliefs. Christianity, colonialism, the history of racialization and the eradication of indigenous beliefs are deeply intertwined.

The New Boy Review: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘Wellmania’

Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy , his first feature film since 2017’s Sweet Country , tells the story of an orphan boy (Aswan Reid) who is kidnapped and taken to a Catholic orphanage-farm, headed up by Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett), with help from Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman) and handyman George (Wayne Blair). Largely mute, the orphan — christened “New Boy” by everyone else — eventually emerges as some kind of semi-messianic figure on the farm, as the title character experiences healing powers and an ability to converse with snakes. Plus, bouts of stigmata make the connections obvious.

The New Boy Review: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Awareness’

The New Boy takes place sometime during WWII, with young men and goods all redirected to the war effort, ensuring a sparse, austere material space for the audience. Thornton isn’t interested in moralistic statements about the very real terrors of colonialism, as he assumes that viewers know that the oppression and genocide of indigenous Australians is a tragedy and a crime. The New Boy is rather more interested in the sincerity of faith at its center, and the way indigenous and Christian beliefs intersect or conflict. Thornton recognizes that the two adult Indigenous Australian characters — Sister Mum and George — are otherwise genuine members of the flock, regardless of the forces of oppression and coercion that may have led them to this point. Sister Eileen may be a stern, commanding matriarch, but she’s also generous with her time and love . The other boys in the orphanage (all given Biblical names) are, at first, threatening and bullying, yet they learn to back off gradually.

The New Boy Review: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Love Again’

Thornton’s film is tricky, slippery and evocative. With the writer-director working as his own cinematographer, The New Boy’s  warm, golden-tinged images recall classic Westerns. Indeed, there is something mythological at play, as the “supernatural” is taken at face value. Not only are the film’s semi-Messianic qualities relegated to the title character’s inner circle , but there are also motifs throughout, most particularly a crucified wooden statue of Jesus who seems capable of breathing, sighing, blinking and winking to Reid’s character. There’s little shock and awe — just a serene acceptance that these points of “unreality” are, in fact, real to the protagonists.

The New Boy Review: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘Reality’

The New Boy  doesn’t necessarily depict  a realistic, concrete depiction of religious activity, but more of a filmic equivalent of the biggest step in any form of religious belief — that small leap of faith that allows one to take these beliefs as being part of the fabric of reality. Whether one’s beliefs are Christian or rooted in the spirituality of the indigenous Australian people, the character beliefs in The New Boy are indeed  real , and as such form one’s daily existence. These beliefs in turn form values and social structures, all of which respond to the world around them. To forcibly take these beliefs away from someone is an act of violence, but even if we are to assume that the imposition of Christian beliefs on New Boy, Sister Mum, George and the majority of the orphanage’s indigenous children is an act of violence, then how does their sincerity in Christian beliefs complicate this relationship?

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There’s no easy answer to that question of course, but Thornton is willing to get his hands deep into such hefty thinking, with a richness of theological ambiguity throughout The New Boy . There’s no judgement at play — let he who is without sin cast the first stone — but rather a lyrical, metaphysical interest in how the presence of New Boy creates quiet ripples throughout his small, hermetic community. One could argue that New Boy’s “supernatural’ abilities, within the context of an isolated farm in what appears to be a bucolic rolling landscape of golden fields and refreshing streams, function as imageries of a new Eden, where indigenous Australian beliefs (and their more sensitive relationship to the Earth than modern Christianity) are given a place equal to or above Christianity’s philosophy of love and forgiveness unto your neighbor. As for New Boy’s relationship with snakes, they are not Satan sent to tempt Adam and Eve into the Forbidden Fruit, but rather natural beings at one with the land, to be treated with respect and a healthy fear. The positive parts of Christian theology are largely embraced in The New Boy , and the film’s negative aspects — the fear, angst and patriarchal control — are muddied, with Sister Eileen even pretending to be the orphanage’s now-deceased head priest in letters, so as to maintain their strange, untouched idyll.

The New Boy Review: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’

The New Boy doesn’t shy away from the colonial history behind Catholicism’s presence in Australia. After all, the film starts with the brutal kidnapping of New Boy, but it’s not interested in repeating this statement throughout. To do so insults the audience’s intelligence (which is probably why The New Boy  has received a muted response on the festival circuit so far, whilst trash such as Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest gets five-star plaudits out of two hours of “the Nazis were bad, y’know”). But Thornton’s drama is that rare film that’s willing to step beyond obvious moral platitudes to dive into something more empathetic, something that’s no doubt much harder to achieve — a sense of wonderment and sincerity that’s only possible with belief in something beyond the world around us, regardless of what one’s belief system may be.

The New Boy Review: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’

Of course, such haughty and lofty aims for a filmmaker are impossible without the requisite technical qualities to pull it off. I’ve already remarked on Thornton’s incredible image-making qualities in The New Boy , but credit must also go to the performances. Blanchett is the star name, yet she’s always been a supreme professional, willing to tamp down her A-lister qualities in favor of an earthier, more humble performance when the context calls for it. Reid may only be 11 years old, but there’s a simplicity and pureness to his screen presence that makes him utterly engrossing, capable of embodying both a young boy and a Messianic figure. The New Boy is a film of deep, mystical qualities, and I can’t wait to revisit it.

Fedor Tot ( @redrightman ) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

The New Boy Review: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Lessons in Chemistry’

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The New Boy starts enthralling, but ends in a quagmire

Amid the setting of a remote outback orphanage, Warwick Thorton takes on some big questions about God and the universe – but fails to answer them.

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Last week, at a screening of Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy , Nashen Moodley, the director of the Sydney Film Festival (SFF), recalled how exhilarated he was by Thornton’s debut feature, Samson & Delilah (2009).

That film was widely praised, frequently spoken of as a landmark in local cinema, but it’s hard to believe it would leave anyone with a feeling of exhilaration.

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Film review: The New Boy

An Indigenous boy with supernatural powers is a gift from God in a Warwick Thornton film about the spiritual damage done by the missionaries.

The dramatic opening filmed on stony ground near Burra in South Australia has the new boy (Aswan Reid) choking the life out of a white policeman who he climbs onto like a deranged zombie. They are unequal in size but the boy has supernatural strength and walks away, only to be felled by an incoming boomerang.

Which is how he comes to be delivered in a sack in the 1940s to an isolated Outback monastery where the head nun, Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett), is in the fervid throes of a religious quest whose purpose she has never found. For reasons not made clear, Sister Eileen and her offsider Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman), who care for homeless boys, are happy to let the new one wander around undisciplined, like a rescued puppy.

“It’s the pecking order,” Sister Eileen says indulgently, as one of her other charges comes to grief. Only the monastery manager George (Wayne Blair) has his hackles up: he is on a good wicket on a property that yields olives and grain and is not about to let a newcomer mess it up.

This strange and often silent film has moments of magic and majesty underpinned by a dark and swirling score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. But supporting these sublime moments are a series of undeveloped ideas: things touched on and then left, started but not finished. The priest running the monastery has died and the nuns don’t want anyone finding out. But why? There seems little to hide as they teach the boys faith and send them out into the world.

Thornton is a masterful filmmaker whose 2017 feature, Sweet Country , was a tragic Indigenous western while his 2021 screen series, Firebite , gave us an engaging splatter fest about Indigenous vampires defending their turf – it was filmed in Coober Pedy – against an invasion of zombies. As an analogy of colonial occupation, it was brilliant, and it was fun.

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Here, Blanchett is jumpy, febrile and weepy as the deluded nun looking for whatever miracle she can latch onto while Reid is magnificent – he carries the story in his tough little body.

But it feels like a film that needed more thought and a stronger, cohesive narrative that justified its almost two-hour run time.

The ending – which is overlong and obsessed with stigmata – is ripe with analogy: a story of Indigenous power and wonder curbed and destroyed by smiling missionaries who made their flock seek refuge in a god they did not understand. As The New Boy reminds us, Indigenous people already had rich creation stories of their own.

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Here, Blanchett is jumpy, febrile and weepy as the deluded nun looking for whatever miracle she can latch onto while Reid is magnificent – he carries the story in his tough little body.

The ending – which is overlong and obsessed with stigmata – is ripe with analogy: a story of Indigenous power and wonder curbed and destroyed by smiling missionaries who made their flock seek refuge in a god they did not understand. As The New Boy reminds us, Indigenous people already had rich creation stories of their own.

This article is republished from InReview under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article .

InReview is an open access, non-profit arts and culture journalism project. Readers can support our work with a donation . Subscribe to InReview’s free weekly newsletter here .

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New Boy, The

Short takes

Not suitable under 10; parental guidance to 13 (violence, themes, distressing scenes, language)

This topic contains:

• overall comments and recommendations
• details of classification and consumer advice lines for New Boy, The
• a review of New Boy, The completed by the Australian Council on Children and the Media (ACCM) on 6 July 2023 .

Overall comments and recommendations

About the movie

This section contains details about the movie, including its classification by the Australian Government Classification Board and the associated consumer advice lines. Other classification advice (OC) is provided where the Australian film classification is not available.

ACCM review

This review of the movie contains the following information:

• a synopsis of the story
• use of violence
• material that may scare or disturb children
• product placement
• sexual references
• nudity and sexual activity
• use of substances
• coarse language
• the movie’s message

A synopsis of the story

A wild orphan, referred to as ‘New Boy’ (Aswan Reid), is taken from his ancestral lands and brought to a small orphanage run by Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett) and Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman) in the middle of outback New South Wales. With the help of a labourer called George (Wayne Blair), the nuns look after a group of boys, including Head Boy Michael (Shane Brady), until they are old enough to go off to work on sheep stations. Unable to speak English, New Boy tries to make sense of his surroundings and the way he is now expected to live, often with surprising results. When a statue depicting the crucifixion of Jesus arrives, New Boy develops a fascination with it. The nuns sense a specialness about New Boy and occasionally treat him differently, making allowances that otherwise would not have been permitted. New Boy, himself, seems to have a magical touch and takes great pleasure and pride in it as it brings him comfort and solace in difficult times and allows him to help and heal in ways that the adults around him cannot explain or truly understand. Will his newfound religious fascination dim his innate power, or will New Boy find a way to keep the magic that resides in his heart and connects him to his country, while learning to live as the nuns instruct?

Themes info

Children and adolescents may react adversely at different ages to themes of crime, suicide, drug and alcohol dependence, death, serious illness, family breakdown, death or separation from a parent, animal distress or cruelty to animals, children as victims, natural disasters and racism. Occasionally reviews may also signal themes that some parents may simply wish to know about.

The loss of culture and identity; Assimilation; Loss of family; The struggle for survival; Religious fervour; Deceitfulness.

Use of violence info

Research shows that children are at risk of learning that violence is an acceptable means of conflict resolution when violence is glamourised, performed by an attractive hero, successful, has few real life consequences, is set in a comic context and / or is mostly perpetrated by male characters with female victims, or by one race against another.

Repeated exposure to violent content can reinforce the message that violence is an acceptable means of conflict resolution. Repeated exposure also increases the risks that children will become desensitised to the use of violence in real life or develop an exaggerated view about the prevalence and likelihood of violence in their own world.

There is some violence in this movie, including:

• New Boy strangles a man, leaving him unconscious in the desert.
• New Boy is hit in the head with a boomerang and knocked unconscious.
• New Boy is hauled in a sack, and is dragged and chucked around in the process of being taken to the orphanage.
• Sister Eileen fights a police officer for getting rough with and scaring New Boy.
• One of the boys punches New Boy in the stomach and New Boy retaliates, punching the other so hard that he is knocked out.
• Michael canes one of the other boys for stealing food. The boy is shown with large red welts on his palms.
• New Boy shoves Michael for caning the other child.
• A snake is hit and killed with rocks after it bites one of the boys.
• The boys beat field mice to death with bats and clubs.
• Nails are hammered into the hands of a statue of Jesus and New Boy sees blood dripping from the hands, down onto the ground.
• George slaughters a sheep, slitting its throat and allowing its blood to ooze out.
• New Boy kills two lambs by bashing their skills in. He also kills and skewers three lizards and brings them to the kitchen.
• Sister Eileen smashes a bunch of baby snakes on the floor of the church.
• New Boy crucifies himself by forcing the nails that went through the hands of the statue of Jesus into his own palms.

Material that may scare or disturb children

Under five info.

Children under five are most likely to be frightened by scary visual images, such as monsters, physical transformations.

• Nothing further noted, though the scenes and images mentioned below may also scare or disturb some children in this age group.

Aged five to eight info

Children aged five to eight will also be frightened by scary visual images and will also be disturbed by depictions of the death of a parent, a child abandoned or separated from parents, children or animals being hurt or threatened and / or natural disasters.

In addition to the above-mentioned violent scenes and scary visual images, there are some scenes in this movie that could scare or disturb children aged five to eight, including the following:

• Michael is bitten by a snake and faints as the poison works its way through his body. George is frantic as he attempts to suck the poison out. The other boys run to get help, while the New Boy works his magic and seems to draw out some sort of black blood. Michael is quite unwell but is able to recover.
• The scenes in which the boys are killing field mice by bashing them to death while the adults harvest the wheat; when the sheep is slaughtered by George; and when the New Boy is shown to have killed the lambs and lizards, could all be upsetting to some children.
• The scene where New Boy has driven nails into his own palms and is sitting on the floor of the church with blood all over him, until a horrified Sister Eileen carries him away, may be upsetting and confusing for some children.

Aged eight to thirteen info

Children aged eight to thirteen are most likely to be frightened by realistic threats and dangers, violence or threat of violence and / or stories in which children are hurt or threatened.

• Nothing further noted.

Product placement

• None noted.

Sexual references

Nudity and sexual activity, use of substances.

There is some use of substances in this movie, including:

• Sister Eileen often drinks wine in her room and appears to have alcoholic tendencies.
• New Boy is thirsty and cannot find water, so he pours himself some wine from Sister Eileen’s jug and drinks that instead.
• New Boy finds a bottle of wine but struggles to open it. He smashes the top off the bottle and drinks from the broken lower half.

Coarse language

There is some coarse language in this movie, including:

• Little bugger
• Little darkie

In a nutshell

The New Boy is an outback drama, set in 1940’s wartime Australia. Filmed, written and directed by Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton, it boasts wonderful performances set against beautiful, barren landscapes and leaves the viewer to wonder about the relationship between spirituality and magic. The New Boy is best suited to older, more mature audiences.

The main messages from this movie are that the magic and power of spiritual beliefs and practices can come in many forms and in many guises; and that the power of compassion, empathy and kindness transcends time, race and culture.

Values in this movie that parents may wish to reinforce with their children include:

• Self-reliance
• Industriousness.

This movie could also give parents the opportunity to discuss with their children attitudes and behaviours, and their real-life consequences, such as:

• The dangers of playing with snakes.
• The dangers of religious fanaticism.
• The impact of removing Aboriginal children from their culture and overpowering their spiritual beliefs and practices.

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Edgar Wright Reads Your 'Shaun of the Dead' Letterboxd Reviews To Celebrate 20th Anniversary

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The Big Picture

• Edgar Wright engages with fans by reading and reacting to Letterboxd reviews of Shaun of the Dead , celebrating the film's 20th anniversary.
• Wright's distinct style and genre-blending talents have earned him a cult following, with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz leading in ratings.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has the most fans of Wright's work on Letterboxd, showcasing his broad appeal.

In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Shaun of the Dead , director Edgar Wright has taken to reading and reacting to some of the most notable Letterboxd reviews of his beloved horror-comedy. As fans gear up for the film's re-release in U.S. theatres on August 30 , via Focus Features, Wright’s engagement with the community that has kept the film alive and well over the years adds a special layer of connection.

Wright, known for his distinct style and a penchant for blending genres, has always had a close relationship with his fanbase. This latest interaction only reinforces that bond, as the director dives into the reviews, offering his thoughts and perhaps even a few laughs as he revisits the film through the eyes of his audience. Shaun of the Dead , which has an impressive 4.0 average rating on Letterboxd, remains one of Wright’s highest-rated films on the platform. The film, alongside Hot Fuzz —which sits slightly higher with a 4.1 average—has cemented Wright as a cult favorite among cinephiles.

Interestingly, despite Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz leading in ratings, it’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World that boasts the title of Wright's film with the "most fans" on Letterboxd . With a 3.9 rating, Scott Pilgrim may not be his highest-rated work, but it clearly resonates deeply with viewers, earning it a spot as the 26th film with the most fans on the app. Wright’s engagement with Letterboxd doesn’t stop at reading reviews, his personal list of 1,000 favorite movies is featured on the platform , allowing patrons and pro members to track how many of Wright's favorites they’ve seen. This list, which Wright describes as a "personal and subjective" collection assembled for his own enjoyment, serves as a window into the director’s influences and cinematic tastes.

What Is 'Shaun of the Dead' About?

The film follows Shaun, played by Simon Pegg , a 29-year-old electronics store employee whose life is going nowhere. He spends his days at work, his evenings in the pub with his best friend Ed ( Nick Frost ), and is generally stuck in a rut. His girlfriend, Liz ( Kate Ashfield ), is frustrated by Shaun's lack of ambition and breaks up with him, pushing him to finally take some initiative in his life.

However, Shaun's attempt to win Liz back is complicated by the sudden outbreak of a zombie apocalypse. With the undead rising all around them, Shaun and Ed embark on a mission to save their loved ones, including Liz, Shaun's mother Barbara ( Penelope Wilton ), and a few other friends. Their plan? Hole up in their favorite pub, The Winchester, and wait for the whole thing to blow over.

As Shaun of the Dead returns to the big screen, fans both old and new have the perfect excuse to revisit the film, not just through a re-watch but also through the unique lens provided by Letterboxd and Wright’s own reflections on his work. Shaun of the Dead returns to theatres on August 30. Stay tuned to Collider for more.

• Shaun of the Dead
• Edgar Wright