When an actor wins a big award, or in the case of Cillian Murphy, the biggest award, the pressure mounts when it comes to answering that old chestnut of what happens next. Respect to Murphy, as rather than cash in his respectability chips with some thankless sidekick role in a superhero monstrosity, he’s chosen to keep things a little bit more real and focus on simple, old school character pieces which allow him to flex his dramatic muscles in a way that would not be so available to him in Hollywood.
Steve is Murphy’s second collaboration with the Dutch director Tim Mielants following the 2024 film, Small Things Like These, and this time it’s a loose adaptation of Max Porter’s intimate novella, ‘Shy‘. In fact, the focus of Porter’s novel – a juvenile delinquent suffering from suicidal ideation while living in a special boarding school for troubled teenagers – has been bumped into the background, and now the white middle-class head of the school, Steve (Murphy), has been nudged to the fore.
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The film charts a single madcap day in which the world comes tumbling down around Steve: a camera crew are coming in to film a piece about the school; their future funding hangs in the balance; a local Tory MP (Roger Allam, obvs) is set to come in for a public address; and the boys are being absolute rotters. Mielants’ leans heavily on Steve’s hectic plate spinning, where he rests only to indulge his own private coping mechanisms. This leads to many scenes of people looking harried, clutching their hair, swearing, shouting and generally overacting.
Despite the old cliché of wanting to be the person who saves the lost souls at this school, there’s very little reason given why the Steve character is so invested in this project, and there’s precious little focus on what the staff are actually doing to rehabilitate the kids. It’s sparse on the technical detail of how these “half-way houses” actually work, and what the structure is supposed to be (even as it falls apart), so it all seems a bit abstract. Emily Watson is on hand as the freelance therapist, but from what we see, even her efforts seem entirely futile.
A general lack of detail ends up meaning that a lot of the film’s emotion and ideas are stated directly, whether through Murphy’s jittery (and at times quite contrived) performance, or via a voiceover device. Steve keeps saying how much he loves these boys and that’s what’s driving him, but the film stops short of actually trying to show that, and as such it ends up patronising the boys. It also leans quite heavily on thin stereotypes, such as Allam’s stuffed-shirt MP, a slimy funding partner and the TV crew whose cynical commentary about what they’re filming never feels authentic.
Porter, who has written the screenplay, tries to sell us the notion that these types of institutions have some sort of implicit or therapeutic value, but is never serious in talking about the genuine pressures and obstacles that make their maintenance so difficult. Would a run-of-the-mill day not have been eventful enough?
Tracey Ullman delivers a very appealing and nuanced performance as one of Steve’s senior colleagues, and she manages to channel some of that surreal drive that keeps such amazing and selfless people in such physically-testing jobs. Shy’s story arc is the most interesting, and his up and down mood certainly make him one of the more intriguing presences in the film. Yet his fate is far too heavily signposted in the now-customary flash-forward prologue, and we don’t spend enough time with him for the outcome to land emotionally. If this material and setting is something that holds interest, then digging out a copy of Alan Clarke’s 1979 film Scum hits would do you well.