The New Boy Review: Warwick Thornton’s Quietly Devastating Look at Faith, Identity, and Assimilation

Aswan Reid stars in The New Boy, an Aboriginal coming-of-age drama.

In The New Boy, director Warwick Thornton offers a quietly devastating meditation on faith, colonization, and the spiritual resilience of Aboriginal people through the eyes of a child. What begins as an otherworldly parable slowly reveals itself to be a deeply personal reckoning—one that feels urgent, ancestral, and sorrowfully familiar.

Set in 1940s rural Australia, the film centers around a nameless Aboriginal child (played with stunning presence by newcomer Aswan Reid) who’s taken to a remote monastery run by a renegade nun, played with subtle tension by Cate Blanchett. The boy, apprehended in the Outback, is placed among other young Aboriginal boys being “civilized” into farmhands through religion and rigid Christian order. What unfolds is not just a clash of beliefs, but a slow, painful unraveling of self—how identity is erased, rewritten, and suppressed under the guise of salvation.

Thornton, who grew up in one of these institutions himself, brings a level of intimacy and authenticity to the story that can’t be faked. You feel the weight of lived experience behind every frame, every whispered prayer, every act of forced conformity. The film isn’t heavy-handed, but it doesn’t flinch either—it shows the beauty of indigenous spirituality and how quickly it is strangled by systems claiming to “save” it.

The New Boy, despite its name, is not simply about a child adjusting to a new life. It’s about an entire people struggling against an old lie. The lie that one way of being—white, Christian, Western—is inherently better. And while the film paints this conflict in soft brush strokes, it’s unafraid to expose the violence of assimilation: the theft of names, languages, sacred knowledge.

Aswan Reid’s performance is one of remarkable restraint and quiet power. He doesn’t speak much, but you never lose sense of what he’s feeling—his eyes carry the spirit of someone tethered between worlds. Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, brings a complex fragility to her role as Sister Eileen—a woman battling patriarchy while complicit in its colonial extensions.

The film’s magic-realism moments—glimpses of the boy’s healing abilities, his connection to light, nature, and life—are poetic rather than showy. The New Boy is less about spectacle than it is about mourning. Mourning what was taken, what was silenced, and what still pulses beneath the surface, waiting to be remembered.

That said, the film isn’t flawless. At times, it feels as if Thornton could’ve pushed deeper into the tension between spiritual traditions. There’s a lingering ambiguity about the boy’s final transformation that might leave some audiences wanting more clarity. But perhaps that’s intentional. Perhaps The New Boy isn’t meant to resolve anything—but to leave you with the ache of what’s been lost.

2.5 out of 5 stars. Quiet, contemplative, and painfully necessary—The New Boy is a cinematic hymn for all the spirits smothered by “salvation.” Watch it, discuss it, and listen closely. The land still remembers.

DIRECTOR: Warwick Thornton

FEATURING: Cate Blanchett, Aswan Reid, Wayne Blair

and Deborah Mailman