Steve

Director Tim Mielants and Oscar winner Cillian Murphy reunite, after Small Things Like These and Peaky Blinders, for a powerful adaptation of author and screenwriter Max Porter’s bestselling 2023 novella, Shy.

It’s the mid-’90s. Steve (Murphy) is the passionate head of a crumbling “last chance” reform school for teenage boys. With meagre resources, overstretched staff, and a mounting sense of futility, Steve must navigate one pivotal and precarious day made more tense by the arrival of a documentary news crew profiling the school, and the result may prove to be more exposé than commendation.

The school is part institution and part last-ditch social experiment conducted in a shoddy rural manor house run by tired adults who believe their students still have something to offer the world. The boys, meanwhile, navigate an uneasy border between volatility and vulnerability. Mielants captures this tension and the quiet ruptures of the day with raw immediacy, shifting between verité-style footage (complete with interviews) and intimate glimpses of private moments. Fights break out, staff flounder, and mistakes are made as Steve clings to the belief that things will turn out well.

Murphy, in a performance that glows with haunted conviction, anchors a remarkable cast. Jay Lycurgo is extraordinary as Shy, a young man fighting the undertow of his own mind, pulled between despair and the faintest flicker of possibility. Tracey Ullman and Emily Watson bring grounded, aching depth to roles shaped by care and compromise.

Steve is a bruised elegy for institutions under siege and a character study shaped by the courage of those who persist within them; a chamber piece of forceful commitment, lost boys, and stubborn acts of hope.

JASON RYLE