The spark of life that gave Warwick Thornton what is now “The New Boy” took 18 years to flicker, and then fully glow. The Australian filmmaker looked to his own childhood, raised by monks, to find the spiritual fairy tale that now manifests via the film’s eponymous Aboriginal child in a sweeping and poetic portrait of stifled faith and the threat of monopoly on religion.
Thornton’s cinema is one of enormous, orchestral music and vast landscapes that envelop and invite us in, even if you feel like you don’t know where you’re going or shouldn’t be allowed to look around. It’s the kind of culturally specific filmmaking that somehow immediately gains universality in that ambition to connect, to understand the empathy and sensitivity to listen in to these conflicts and this bright spark of a boy who speaks to struggles of faith however you were raised.
Thornton’s cinema is one of enormous, orchestral music and vast landscapes that envelop and invite us in, even if you feel like you don’t know where you’re going or shouldn’t be allowed to look around. It’s the kind of culturally specific filmmaking that somehow immediately gains universality in that ambition to connect, to understand the empathy and sensitivity to listen in to these conflicts and this bright spark of a boy who speaks to struggles of faith however you were raised.
- 5/20/2023
- by Ella Kemp
- Indiewire
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