Cillian Murphy has used the clout given to him by his Oppenheimer Oscar for Best Actor creatively. Last year he launched his own production company, Big Things Films, and released Small Things Like These, a sensitive adaptation of Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel. Murphy starred as well as produced. This beautiful, earnest film was directed by Tim Mielants, a Belgian who had previously worked with Murphy on Peaky Blinders.
Steve is the second film to be made by Big Things Films, in association with Netflix. Mielants directs and Murphy stars again, this time as the troubled head of Stratton Wood, a “last chance” boarding school in the English countryside for disruptive, violent boys: young offenders, then. Max Porter, the lauded author of the innovative, rhapsodical novels Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015) and Lanny (2019), has adapted his 2023 novel, Shy.
The book is the internal monologue of a 16-year-old pupil, nicknamed Shy, who is in deep trouble and despair. Porter, who previously collaborated with Murphy on a stage production of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, has used his writer’s authority to turn the story around to focus instead on Steve, the no-less troubled man in charge of the institution.
Set in 1996, before mobiles and social media, the film makes artful use of the technology of the day to emulate the polyphony of the novel. A TV crew is spending the day at the school to produce a short news item about its success or failure, and we see a lot of their fuzzy video, including sitting everybody down to describe themselves in just three words. Steve, almost too stressed to speak, says just that he is “very, very tired”. With no time to conduct meetings, he carries around a Dictaphone, recording notes for himself and the other, equally harassed, sometimes assaulted staff. Meanwhile, Shy (Jay Lycurgo: excellent, his distinguished, withdrawn presence matching that of Murphy, but visibly 27, not 16) cocoons himself in crushing drum and bass from his Walkman.
For all its multiple voices and some zany camerawork, the film firmly anchors itself in a quasi-documentary fashion, following through 24 hours consecutively, giving us specific timings. As an aside, the story was filmed entirely consecutively, too – a rarity. We meet Steve driving to work through the countryside, where he spots Shy in a field, dancing, headphones on, smoking a spliff. “This isn’t great, is it, Shy?” he says mildly. “Out here at breakfast time getting fully baked.” It is, however, peaceful in its way, compared to the school, which is bedlam – a roiling storm of insults and aggression, fights and noise.
As well as the disruptive TV crew, the day includes an absurdly patronising visit from the local MP, Sir Hugh Montagu-Powell (Roger Allam), Shy sparkily asking him if he has had special training to be an MP, “or have you always been a c**t?” For good measure, the school’s posh management appear and announce that it is to be closed at Christmas, its grand setting sold.
All the staff are committed; none seem to be coping. Simbi Ajikawo, better known as Little Simz, plays Shola, a new and already seemingly traumatised staff member. Tracey Ullman and Emily Watson are the weary veterans. Steve, though, we gradually learn, is falling apart, in constant pain and guilt from a severe car crash a few years before, gulping powerful painkillers and hitting the bottle, rendering himself incapable by night time when Shy needs him most. For Shy, having been told on the phone earlier by his mum that it’s over, they’re done with him, has collected a rucksack of rocks with which to submerge himself finally, Virginia Woolf-style.
Steve is a film that would not work at all with a lesser actor than Cillian Murphy at its centre. He grips your attention and demands empathy, even if, whiskery and haunted, turning ever greyer through this dreadful day, he’s less sheerly beautiful here than usual. The film ends on a startling sentimental high. Tribute is paid by the teachers to the great qualities of the young offenders (and actors), one by one, including Shy – “so sharp and insightful when he wants to be, he’s got a generous pain, if that makes sense”. There’s a joyous group hug. Steve returns home to his fantastic family.
“We need new frameworks of compassion, indebtedness, interdependence, fragility,” Max Porter has suggested. We do. The film, though, leaves you thinking that change needs to start a lot further back.
“Steve” is in selected cinemas from 19 September and will be available to stream on Netflix from 3 October
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This article appears in the 17 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Can Zohran Mamdani save the left?
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