Guy Lodge Film Critic The new boy doesn’t get a name, and he doesn’t give one. Arriving at an isolated orphanage in rural South Australia in the early 1940s, he’s taken in with brisk kindness by the two nuns who oversee the place, but privileges like names are for children a little further along in their understanding and acceptance of this establishment’s firm Christian principles: Until he’s ready for baptism, the shirtless, mostly wordless Aboriginal newcomer will be acknowledged but not identified.
It’s a limbo state that evocatively represents the tension between Australia’s Indigenous population and even the most notionally inclusive of their colonizers; in Warwick Thornton’s thoughtful magical-realist fable “The New Boy,” spiritual differences aren’t treated with violence, but echo bloody territorial conflict just the same.
Inspired by Thornton’s own experience of growing up as an Aboriginal boy in a Christian boarding school, this is ambitious, tonally tricky filmmaking, bringing an unexpected dose of whimsy to social interests more austerely explored in Thornton’s excellent previous features “Samson and Delilah” and “Sweet Country.” Meandering but never uninvolving, the film benefits, like its predecessors, from its writer-director-cinematographer’s extraordinary eye for light and locale, which goes beyond dewy pictorialism to reclaim a landscape from its imposing occupiers.
The film’s visual splendor, along with a ripely entertaining performance by producer Cate Blanchett (in a rare return to Australian features) as the orphanage’s offbeat abbess, represent its chief selling points to international distributors; in the title role, kinetic, wide-eyed novice Aswan Reid is its secret weapon.
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