Review
Steve (Drama) [Based on a Novella] (2025)
Director: Tim Mielants
Writer: Max Porter (Based on Novella by)
Stars: Cillian Murphy, Tracey Ullman, Jayw Lycurgo, Emily Watson
Centred around a solitary day at a boys’ reform school, a head teacher and his staff face mounting pressure and escalating tension as the system begins to collapse from within.
Premiering at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, Tim Mielants’ Steve is based on Max Porter’s novella Shy. This project was announced a year before its official release, with Cillian Murphy’s production company attached, following previous collaborations between Murphy, Mielants and Porter. The film has been produced by Big Things Films and distributed internationally by Netflix and in Ireland by Volta Pictures.
Steve (Cillian Murphy) is the head teacher of Stanton Wood, a residential reform school for troubled teenagers. As the institution faces closure due to funding shortages, Steve struggles to maintain internal stability while managing the daily pressures of the environment he finds himself in. Over the course of a single day, the boys, a film crew, and further escalations push a straining system to the brink of collapse, tough to navigate and near-impossible to keep in check.
Without any room for compromise, Mielants shows a flicker of playfulness before throwing us into a volatile environment. The forcefulness of the institution places the viewer directly in the headmaster’s shoes, exhausting the viewer while allowing endearment to form slowly, as the pressures of a collapsing welfare system compound in real time.
In the midst of chaos, Murphy’s Steve is forced into the role of a shepherd, barely restraining his own stability as mounting responsibilities disrupt an already precarious balance. These pressures and external obligations, a parade of media and officials, only highlight the vacuum within a neglected, decaying structure. While a harsh blow to the staff working day and night to keep Stanton Wood a safe environment for the forgotten, the real casualties are the boys—discarded by society, their heads held above water only just. In an attempt to guide them, their headmaster reflects that instability, a fragile figure who loses control as the day moves on, fighting the current and scrambling to keep the children afloat, not as a martyr, yet one of the few who seem to care.
As the water rises, a continuous tension can leave the viewer feeling as though they are drowning, volatility springing forth into a state of chaos with underlying tones of empathy seeping through. That empathy has to be earned, and Lycurgo’s Shy is a vital piece in that puzzle. Drawn into the intensity and emotional exhaustion of Mielants’ screenplay as a whole, it is Shy who is overlooked, much like the collapse of the feigned structure, and as everyone wobbles, trying to keep spinning plates, the quiet one drowns first. As leaks spring in every which way, it is the barely functional figure at its centre that builds the strongest foundation—grounding not empathy in sentimentality, but in endurance.
Seemingly imprecise and unrefined, Steve manages to deliver an intentional disorganisation—difficult in execution. It is an observational portrait of social welfare and institutional failure, where care struggles to persist and solutions fade through a lack of funding. There is a quiet tragedy in how a small, yet dedicated group of individuals are left to carry the true weight of morally defunct decision-making, bound to fail despite their efforts.
Verdict
Lessons in collapse.
7,0
