Steve (2025)

After a few weeks of watching Westerns, surreal road trips and car chases, it was nice to settle into film that felt like me:

Small-scale, independent, character-driven, adapted from a literary novella, welfare issues, complex lives.

Steve is a British film, based on Max Porter’s novel Shy. It is directed by Tim Mielants and stars Cillian Murphy, Tracey Ullman, Emily Watson and a powerful debut from Jay Lycurgo as pupil, Shy. It is a dramatic, dark comedy.

Set at the end of the destructive era of Thatcher/Major politics in the UK, 1996, Britain was broken. Steve (Cillian Murphy) is a headteacher of an experimental school for boys with behaviour and societal problems. It covers a chaotic 24 hours of crushing disappointments, bad decisions, intrusions, aggressions, and reconciliations. At times it is a difficult watch. The world it depicts is unsteady. The school is a tinderbox of violence.

Everyone and everything is broken. Steve is broken by a car accident and an addiction to pain killers. The boys are broken by a system that expects too much and provides too little. Teachers are broken by attacks, low pay and the constant uphill battles. Professional boundaries are broken. Families are broken. Shy takes a phone call from his mother. She won’t be calling again. She can’t. She is broken. And this broke me in the cinema. I was scared and angry on Shy’s behalf.

The code of ethics of the TV crew there to film a segment for a local news programme is broken. The narrative is broken by their presence. A crew that interrupts moments, and tries to provide soundbites about young men whose needs can’t be easily categorised. TV needs an angle and it is easier to concentrate on the bad behaviour of the pupils or the sensationalism of expanding budgets over the heartbreak of the pupils’ circumstances. Their editorial is looking for someone or something to blame, like absent parents or liberal over-compassion and naivetie. Promises are broken as the crew intrude into privacy, and taunt the boys into performanes. Story-telling is shattered into fragments and blind spots, regret and impatience.

And yet, the film is beautiful.

Amanda, the Deputy Headteacher (played by Tracey Ullman) says it all when she talks about the official version of the boys. They are complex. And they need specialist, ongoing support. They are hard work.

But off the record:

“I fucking love them.”

Nobody is perfect. Nobody is the paragon of good teaching or good students. The experiment may or may not work.

This is not a perfect film. It relies on the star-power of Cillian Murphy, who gives an intense and devastating performance of the burden of care. He excels as the broken carer, drawing out the subtleties of the task. His face can carry so much with scant dialogue. But, this means that many of the other characters are not as vividly drawn as they deserve. There are heartfelt moments, but they are brief. The film moves on very quickly.

The film has no answers. Nothing is resolved. Despite the humour and compassion, everything is chaos, jittery, unsettled.

And still it is beautiful.

I was lucky I got to see it on the big screen, probably the best way to capture the up-close acting of Murphy. However, I suspect that it will still be beautiful when streamed on Netflix later in the year.

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