Cate Blanchett gives it the full wimple as cantankerous alcoholic nun Sister Eileen in Warwick Thornton’s woozily mystical and slightly unfocused drama set in a remote outback Catholic orphanage in 1940s wartime Australia - and really only a period setting would give us the spectacle of Blanchett in the complete picturesque nun outfit, now a rarity in the modern age.
Blanchett brings to it a fierce authority born of repressed emotion in the time honoured nuns-on-film manner - although she can’t match Kathleen Byron’s troubled nun in Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus. It’s a watchable and atmospheric picture although for me it didn’t have the power of Thornton’s earlier works like Sweet Country (2017) or his debut Samson And Delilah (2009).
The setting is an orphanage on which the secular state dumps inconvenient runaway boys, especially indigenous Australians, to be instructed in Christianity and christened with an Anglo-Saxon name, until such time as they can be sent off to work at sheep stations. But the senior cleric, one Dom Peter, has died, and Sister Eileen has covered up his death with the complicit approval of junior nun Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman) and workman George (Wayne Blair), faking his signature in official correspondence and telling personal visitors he happens to be ill – just so that she can run the orphanage as her own personal fiefdom for Christ.
Then she takes delivery of another child, an indigenous Australian boy, played by newcomer Aswan Reid, and something about this child fills Sister Eileen with a strange indulgence, even awe. He is not christened straight away and left with the name “New Boy”. But the New Boy himself appears to have strange powers and conceives a fascination with the new carved-wood statue of the crucified Christ which Sister Eileen has put up in the church: he starts bleeding from his palms. Is there something special about the New Boy – or is Christian colonialist Eileen depriving him of the specialness he already had?
After some robust storytelling at the start; the film drifts into a series of images and moods which perhaps don’t deliver as much impact as intended. Cate Blanchett herself naturally has an imperious control of any scene she’s in but we don’t gain access to her inner life and backstory in the way I was hoping. A minor film from Thornton.
• The New Boy screened at the Cannes film festival, and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 15 March.
