Australian writer, director, and cinematographer Warwick Thornton (Sweet Country, Samson & Delilah) has a new movie coming called The New Boy. It stars Cate Blanchett (Tár, Thor: Ragnarok, Borderlands) and newcomer Aswan Reid and, in Thornton’s own words, “is about the extinction of a completely beautiful, sustainable, caring religion by a big bully. A religion that can co-exist with other spiritualities, but Christianity refuses to co-exist with it.”
Here’s the official synopsis:
The New Boy takes place in 1940s Australia at a remote monastery with a mission for Aboriginal children run by a renegade nun, Sister Eileen (Blanchett). A new charge (Reid) is delivered in the dead of night—a boy who appears to have special powers. However, the boy’s Indigenous spiritual life does not mesh with the mission’s Christianity and his mysterious power becomes a threat. Sister Eileen is faced with a choice between the traditions of her faith and the truth embodied in the boy, in this story of spiritual struggle and the cost of survival.
“New Boys are all around us. They’re children who recognize safety and can adapt to survive in different situations,” said Thornton. “The New Boy is incredibly innocent, he doesn’t understand this different world but is happy to walk into that world and educate himself in that world, to survive in that world. It’s like any Indigenous person through the last 250 years of colonization. Your lore, your culture and everything has just been completely obliterated to extinction in a strange way. You have to adapt in this new world that is like a plague, like a virus that has completely taken over your life and shut down everything that you’ve believed in. Humans are able to adapt very quickly to survive in any situation, in any environment, in any landscape. In a strange way, that’s what the New Boy is. He’s not judging anybody. He’s just surviving.”
The New Boy premieres in select theaters on May 23, 2025 and will be available digitally on demand starting May 30.
Check out the trailer below.