IF ENTERING a world of wonder is what you want, look no further than The New Boy (Cert. 12). An Aboriginal child, dumped in a sack at a mission house in outback Australia, is part (as opening credits inform us) of the government’s removal of indigenous children from their families and communities. The Church was integral to this policy of “breeding out the black”. The film is set in early 1940s.

Cate Blanchett plays Eileen, a rather broken-down nun, who takes good enough care of her small group of boys despite a dependence on wine. Significantly, the titular new boy (Aswan Reid) never gets named even when he is baptised in an ad hoc ceremony. It is as if he doesn’t really exist as a person, remaining virtually silent throughout the piece. The child inhabits another world, one that speaks of eternity. He is capable of conjuring up fiery coronas of light with his fingers and healing ostensibly fatal snakebites — gifts now lost or perhaps never fully realised in Westernised society.

The writer-director Warwick Thornton is himself from a Kaytetye background and went to a church boarding school. The film makes connections between Aboriginal and Christian spiritualities. The boy’s tree-hugging is succeeded by climbing and embracing a wooden crucifix. He sees things that elude Christian attention — such as witnessing the look that Jesus gives those with eyes to see. The boy experiences Christ’s stigmata in his bleeding hands. He embraces much of e. e. cummings’s “unimaginable You” with each amazing day. As R. S. Thomas reminds us and Thornton shows us, getting to the Kingdom takes no time if, purged of desire, we present ourself with the simple offering of our faith.

Cinematically, Thornton places his audience amid an illimitable terrain, one flowing with earth’s bounty. It recalls the soaring sweeps of pastoral landscapes in Terrence Mallick’s films, not least the aptly named Days of Heaven (Arts, 9 February 2024).

We never really learn much about Eileen’s character. What has led her to a life of quiet desperation? It is unusual to find Cate Blanchett, after so many virtuoso performances (Elizabeth, Tár, et al.), unable to convey her inner turmoil.

This is not a film harshly judging past white behaviour, as in Rabbit-Proof Fence. If anything, it is akin to Walkabout, in which two stranded white schoolchildren have their minds opened to new ways of seeing their world, unencumbered by centuries of particular forms of Christian inculturation. Those in The New Boy are puzzled, intrigued, and also threatened by someone so at ease with the world. Just about the only word that the boy learns and speaks is Amen.

It is a yes to God in what is often a strangely disturbing film; for Thornton never lets our feet settle on terra firma. He doesn’t give us long enough to take off our shoes and appreciate that we may well be treading on hallowed ground. Even fans of the director’s Samson and Delilah or his section of the anthology movie Words with Gods may be perplexed on this occasion. There is here a fine line between engaging with mystery and being obscurantist.

Available on Blu-ray