Steve Movie Review: Chaotic School Drama

Cillian Murphy plays Steve, a teacher with the patience of a saint, in this overwhelming ensemble drama from director Tim Mielants.

Cillian Murphy plays the lead, continuing the collaboration with director Tim Mielants that proved so fruitful in last year’s Small Things Like These. Steve is the headteacher of a reform school for boys in a country house where the students are a danger only to themselves and the few adults willing to support them. It’s 1996, the school is under threat of closure after 17 years of Tory cuts, and now a news crew has rocked up asking what the future holds for these errant young men – and if the taxpayer should be footing the bill for their specialised instruction.

While it’s ostensibly anchored by Steve, the film relies heavily on its supporting cast, almost all of whom we’ve met by the five-minute mark. With so many faces and personalities to accommodate, Mielants struggles to keep things on track. The boys are abrasive, foul-mouthed and violent, leaving Murphy with little space to express anything but exasperation as the headteacher puts out several fires at once. The Oscar winner is in fine form as his usual brooding self, but he’s forced to wrestle for attention on screen.

In the staff room, the standouts are Tracey Ullman and Simbi Ajikawo (AKA musician Little Simz) as Steve’s longtime and long-suffering colleague Amanda and passionate newbie Shola respectively. Among the kids, there’s plenty of comic relief from some talented young performers, but the pathos comes courtesy of a majestic Jay Lycurgo as Shy. Unfortunately, the aforementioned shift of perspective sidelines Lycurgo’s role, and yet he is still tasked with carrying the emotional climax on his back; it’s a big ask for an actor whose character has barely had time to develop, and we are left wondering who exactly the protagonist of this film is meant to be.

Mirroring the busyness of the script, Robrecht Heyvaert’s cinematography makes for an overwhelming experience. He mixes the fictional news crew’s interview footage with more conventional social realism fare, before abandoning vérité altogether in favour of nauseating drone shots, often all within the same scene. He demonstrates technical mastery, and paired with a deafening drum and bass soundtrack this approach emulates the chaos of the school well, but I’d have taken another 20 minutes on the runtime if it had meant we could have slowed down occasionally and given the characters and dialogue room to breathe.

This isn’t so much kitchen sink realism as everything but the kitchen sink. In just an hour and a half, the filmmakers pack in enough themes, characters and plotlines to fill the five-part series it probably should have been; ironic, then, that it comes from Netflix, who aren’t normally shy to churn out a miniseries. The ambition and empathy of the screenplay are to be applauded, and with a cast this strong there’s a lot to like both on the page and the screen, but perhaps on this occasion a more faithful retelling of the source material would have done the trick.

Steve had its World Premiere at TIFF on September 5, 2025. The film will have a limited theatrical release in US theatres and in UK & Irish cinemas on September 19, 2025 and will be available to stream on Netflix on October 3.