Stream It Or Skip It?

My decades-long crush on Cate Blanchett reaches a new confusing height in The New Boy (now streaming on Hulu), in which the living-goddess candidate for best living actor plays – gulp – a nun. The Australian mood-piece drama is from director Warwick Thornton, who used his experience as an Aboriginal who attended a Christian school as inspiration for this magical-realist tale rooted in the country’s shameful history of native assimilation. And while Blanchett is the obvious top-line draw, the movie is rendered truly memorable thanks to young actor Aswan Reid, who plays the title character with remarkable presence. 

THE NEW BOY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We meet this unnamed boy (Reid) as he’s killing a man. Presumably, at least. He’s just a kid, maybe 10 years old give or take, and he’s managed to get an adult soldier off his horse and in a nasty chokehold. The soldier slumps to the ground and before you know it another man pegs the boy with a boomerang. The boy awakens in a burlap sack just prior to being dumped at the front door of a monastery by a different soldier. It’s the middle of the night. Sister Eileen (Blanchett) answers the door ready for violence. No, really. Perhaps she ruffles at the soldier calling the boy “a darkie,” or she’s wary of any gruff and weathered man, alone in the wee hours, but either way, she puts up her dukes. She’s absolutely ready to throw fists. Or perhaps she’s just acting crazy to get him to go away. It works. The most accurate way to describe it? He flees. From a nun. He flees from a nun. You probably would too. Cate Blanchett is fierce.

Sister Eileen carries the boy to an open bed and lays him down but he soon climbs beneath it and conjures a mote of light from his fingertips, and it dances and flies through the air playfully like Tinkerbell. Curious. At dawn he wanders through the monastery and meets Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman), who cooks the food and does the laundry, and George (Wayne Blair), the caretaker. There are maybe eight or nine other boys living here. Sister Eileen will rouse them from bed and they’ll eat some porridge or gruel of some kind before George leads them out to work harvesting hay at the adjacent farm. The boy doesn’t speak. He just observes, staying at the periphery. He doesn’t grok silverware, so he scoops his slop with his fingers and shoves them in his mouth. Later, they will say goodbye to Johnny (Tyler Rockman Spencer), who has graduated from whatever this quasi-educational experience might be to employment at a different farm. It’s the 1940s, the war is raging, workers are in short supply and where is God in all this? Working in mysterious ways? Coldly observing?

Very notably, Sister Eileen is the only White person in the monastery. The rest are Aboriginal. Her goal is to conform to Australian national policies that her ilk “breed out the Black” from native individuals. She will convert all these boys to Christianity. Boys who’ve been orphaned or outright stolen from their families. The new boy – where did he come from? He seems to have simply manifested like a spiritual being. Sister Eileen is kind to him – you attract more flies with honey, you know – but also isn’t quite sure what to do with him. With his mop of shock-blonde hair, he’s almost otherworldly. At times he seems feral, at others, he seems astute and highly intelligent. As it is, Sister Eileen seems to be barely holding things, and herself, together. The priest, Dom Peter, died a year ago, and now she forges his signature on letters, pretending he’s still alive so the monastery may receive goods. She also confesses her sins to his grave. And once the boy uses his healing powers to help another kid recover from a deadly snakebite, well, are all bets off?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Which genius dropped the Weekend at Bernie’s reference in the context of The New Boy? Otherwise, the film has the warm magical-realist tones of Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy mixed with the spacious, oppressive silence of an Australian Western like The Proposition (both it and The New Boy features evocative scores by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis) and pick-a-nun-movie-any-nun-movie-OK-I’ll-pick-Benedetta.

Performance Worth Watching: Reid carries The New Boy with a remarkably expressive face and physical performance that characterizes the boy as knowing, coy and wily, a tantalizing mystery in human form.

Memorable Dialogue: Key line from Sister Eileen’s confession to the pile of dirt: “I baptized Johnny. I’m not sure if it worked. I know it’s a priest thing, not a nun thing.”

Sex and Skin: None. 

Our Take: All bets are not off. The boy must be assimilated into the greater, stupider culture – even as Sister Eileen questions her own faith after witnessing the kinda Christlike “powers” coming from a little non-White kid plucked out of the bush. The boy never gets a Christian name, and he also pulls a very large carved Jesus off the crucifix and feeds him jam and clothes him, just like the Sisters do for these boys. He’s being nice to the man who suffered up on that cross, and that just will not do. Kindness is blasphemy!

For being a film of such meditative tone and pacing, and dead-serious subject matter The New Boy is peculiarly funny. (This isn’t too much of a spoiler, but the carved Christ occasionally moves his head or blinks his eyes from the boy’s perspective, and the end credits nod to the “creature workshop” that designed it, the kind of ironic wording that we heathens find amusing.) Blanchett’s high-strung characterization of Sister Eileen puts her most subtle comedy chops on display, her eyes widening with awe, fear and disbelief in the presence of the boy; it’s a rich performance, as complex as her work in Tar or Carol. The core allegory is rather on-the-nose, but is nonetheless compelling.

It’s not likely that many will experience her intensity, though – The New Boy is a quiet, contemplative and flat-out strange watch for patient art-film audiences and Blanchett completists. Within his (likely deeply personal) story, Thornton has crafted a metaphor for widespread cultural destruction at the hands of evangelists, and subtly employs the art of ridicule by putting Sister Eileen under the magnifying glass, his hand directing the beam of refracted sunlight at her soul. But without Reid’s powerful personification of a mysterious supernaturalism, the film might not be as memorable as it is. 

Our Call: An understated, fascinating drama, The New Boy seeps into your psyche, and you’ll be nun the wiser. With apologies. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.