Q. I have just watched an Australian film shown at the Cannes Film Festival called The New Boy. The film opens with an unnamed Aboriginal boy, immediately distinctive because of his striking curly blond hair, struggling violently with a white horseman. A second horseman knocks him unconscious with a boomerang, after which he is captured and taken to a remote Christian orphanage.
The opening is not merely an arrest; it marks the decisive boundary in the film. Before capture, the boy belongs to himself and to the landscape. He is fierce, mobile, resistant and spiritually intact. Once caught, he becomes the object of other people’s purposes: transported, confined, clothed, named, instructed and finally baptised.
The film is set during the Second World War. The boy, who cannot speak English and is regarded as “untamed”, is delivered to an institution harbouring a secret. Significantly, the only English word he learns is “Amen”. He is not given language with which to understand, question or express himself; he is given only the language of assent. The priest in charge, Dom Peter, has died, and the two nuns running the orphanage are concealing his death from the authorities. The environment is harsh and bare; the other boys are conspicuously obedient, conforming and almost mechanical in their behaviour.
The new boy seems to possess supernatural powers. He is able to produce a mysterious fairy light; he saves one boy from the bite of a venomous snake and another from severe burns. Both of the nuns who run the institution are pitiful figures: one is wrecked by the loss of her family, while the other is morbidly penitential and dependent on alcohol.
A turning point comes when a wooden figure of Jesus is brought into the church. The boy begins to bleed from his palms in apparent imitation of the stigmata, although the film leaves unclear whether the wounds are supernatural or self-inflicted. The film ends with the new boy being baptised and given a Christian name. To his horror, he discovers afterwards that the fairy light which had accompanied him until then has been extinguished.
The theme is one which has appeared in other films: the contrast between conventional life and the wild freedom of the desert. This is why the film struck a chord with me. The implication is that the boy loses his vitality—his life force—as he is made to adapt to the expectations of his new environment. At the end, he is presented as obedient and conforming, like the other boys. We feel that he has lost something precious through conformity—in this case, conformity to a form of Christianity dominated by guilt and penitence. He has lost his soul.
The final irony is devastating. The institution believes that it has saved the boy’s soul; in reality, it has extinguished it. Jesus declared that he had come so that people might “have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10), and taught that “he that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 10:39). Yet the Christianity embodied by the orphanage inverts that message. It offers the boy salvation through obedience, guilt and self-denial, but what it actually takes from him is precisely that abundant life which Jesus proclaimed.
A: Yes. Your reading identifies the central irony of the film: an institution which believes itself to be saving the boy instead destroys the source of his spiritual life.
The baptism is presented outwardly as rescue. He is washed, clothed, named and admitted into the ordered community. Yet inwardly it is a diminishment. The light vanishes. He gains a place within the institution but loses contact with whatever made him singular, powerful and fully alive.
What disappears is not merely happiness but sovereignty—his immediate, unmediated relation to the world. He is too young and innocent to understand what is being done to him until the process is complete. We are formed, named, instructed and disciplined before we possess the capacity to discern and judge the forces shaping us. By the time we are old enough to choose, much of what we might have chosen has already been chosen for us.
The wooden Christ makes the film subtler than a simple opposition between Christianity and Indigenous spirituality. The boy responds freely and compassionately to the wounded figure. He does not begin with doctrine, guilt or atonement; he sees a suffering being and tries to heal it. His encounter with Christ is immediate. The institution then takes possession of that encounter and decides what it must mean.
The destructive force is therefore not necessarily Christ, but institutional interpretation: naming, classifying, baptising and making obedient. Sister Eileen can recognise the boy’s power only by translating it into Christian categories. The tragedy is that, in trying to save what she believes to be sacred, she extinguishes it.
The two nuns are pitiful rather than straightforward villains. Their religion has not liberated them either. Sister Eileen drinks, lies about Dom Peter and longs for the boy to confirm that her sacrifices possess some supernatural meaning. Sister Mum has accommodated herself to grief and institutional discipline. Both are damaged people imposing upon the boy the very system that has failed to make them whole.
The ending therefore carries a brutal irony. The boy is safer, accepted and administratively transformed into an obedient child. He has also been deprived of freedom, identity and light. The institution claims to give him a soul while extinguishing its visible flame.
This connects closely with the distinction between a living foundational narrative and the historical constructs built around it. The boy’s instinctive tenderness towards the suffering Christ belongs to the living narrative. The compulsory name, clothes, baptism and obedience belong to the colonial construct. The film’s deepest accusation is that the construct has inverted the message it claims to serve.
