The New Boy

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

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

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.

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'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.

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.

Like the title character, the film is more about what’s left unsaid, incisively exploring the inconvenient truths beneath the surface without charting an easy path to catharsis.

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.

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.

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.