FILM OF THE WEEK: Steve - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Tim Mielants’ Steve arrives with all the hallmarks of a Very Important Drama: a troubled institution on its last legs, a man on the edge, a family of discarded teens, and the slow bleed of idealism into despair.

What elevates this jagged, sometimes overloaded character study beyond its more familiar trappings is the a searing and committed performance by Cillian Murphy, whose turn as the emotionally threadbare headmaster of a failing reform school is raw, riveting, and vulnerable. As demonstrated in Small Things Like These, Murphy shines in more intimate and psychologically intense projects. He’s wonderful this here, even if the material around him doesn't always match his energy.

Set over a single stormy 24-hour period in 1996, Steve tracks the titular character through what is clearly not his first long day, but what might be his last straw. The headmaster of Stanton Wood, a residential boarding school for adolescent boys with behavioural issues, Steve is barely holding everything together, and his stockpile prescription drugs and alcohol hidden in the school basement isn’t hitting the spot anymore. The school is being shut down in six months by the government; a documentary crew has arrived to record its final days; and Steve himself is hanging on by the skin of his teeth. Asked to describe himself in three words and he says “Very, very tired.”

The problem is that the same might be said for the genre it’s working in. We’ve seen this teacher-before-the-fall story before. From To Sir, With Love to Dangerous Minds, the cinema of inspirational educators stepping into the chaos of underfunded schools and “saving” their troubled, mostly non-white charges has long drawn both awards and criticism. Steve, for all its formal tricks and tonal edginess, doesn’t entirely escape this lineage. While it tries to gesture toward structural critique – the collapse of care, the brutal efficiency of the state, the complexities of male rage and vulnerability – its emotional weight is too often carried by Murphy’s character alone. The students around him feel underdeveloped, sketched as a collection of shouts and traumas rather than full portraits of young men on the brink.

Jay Lycurgo as Shy - the central student in both the source novel by Max Porter and in this reconfigured adaptation - does compelling work in a difficult role. His Shy is wiry and wounded, caught between childlike longing and adult damage, and his scenes with his estranged mother, heard only via telephone, offer some of the film’s most affecting grace notes. But Shy, and many of the other boys, never quite emerge from behind the glass of the film crew’s camera. They are the subject of Steve’s compassion, but we are mostly told they matter rather than shown why. We get brief moments where Steve coaxes out their better natures, but when he rattles off their beautiful qualities in a climactic, sentimental monologue, it’s hard not to wish the film had spent more time letting those boys show us themselves.

This is not to say Steve lacks power. Mielants, reuniting with Murphy after Small Things Like These, leans into a fractured, propulsive visual language, with cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert toggling between murky VHS textures and smoother, more composed shots. Editor Danielle Palmer brings chaotic rhythm to the piece via overlapping dialogue, hurtling cuts, moments of quiet abruptly shattered, and the score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow pulses with both menace and melancholy. The presence of a documentary crew allows for an interrogation of performance itself: the students acting out for the lens, the staff subtly shaping their personas, the image of care always being mediated. These layers are interesting, even if they sometimes threaten to overshadow the emotional through-line.

Emily Watson and Tracey Ullman do thoughtful work in underwritten roles as staff members trying to prop up the walls as they collapse. Watson’s scenes with the boys - especially the physically volatile Tyrone, played with volatile charisma by Tut Nyuot - offer flickers of the therapeutic work that’s supposed to happen in places like Stanton Wood, though even she seems overrun by the demands of a system more interested in containment than healing. Ullman, meanwhile, brings a flinty compassion to Amanda, the tough-love enforcer who sees through Steve’s brittle deflections and knows exactly how close he is to breaking.

It’s Murphy, though, who gives Steve its centre - a man doing everything right on the surface, and nothing right in private. He plays Steve as someone whose well of hope has run dry, but who refuses to stop ladling from it anyway. His physicality is weary but alert, his eyes constantly scanning for the next fight to defuse or the next secret to bury. It’s a performance full of restraint and hurt, without ever begging for sympathy.

For all its intensity, Steve does eventually veer into melodrama. A late-film escalation into trauma territory arrives with a certain inevitability, the kind of plot development that too many films use to artificially deepen stakes.

Still, it’s hard not to admire what Mielants and Murphy are attempting here: a messy, compassionate, uncomfortable look at male pain and institutional failure, rooted in an anger that feels authentic. The film asks tough questions about how we treat boys deemed “too difficult” and what kind of emotional toll that work exacts on the adults who try to help them. It doesn’t always have answers, but it cares, even through the cliché.

• On Netflix & in cinemas now.

  Directed by Tim Mielants. Written by Max Porter, based on his novel Shy. Cinematography by Robrecht Heyvaert.

  Starring Cillian Murphy, Tracey Ullman, Jay Lycurgo, Simbi Ajikawo, Emily Watson, Tut Nyuot. 93 mins