‘Steve’ review: Cillian Murphy impresses at the heart of Netflix’s Max Porter adaptation

Dir: Tim Mielants. Ireland/UK. 2025

It’s 1996, and football fever is gripping the nation as the England men’s team make their way to the Euro semi-finals. At rural English boarding school Stanton Wood, the atmosphere is far less celebratory; this is an institution for troubled boys, and every day brings more than its fair share of challenges. This adaptation of Max Porter’s 2023 novella Shy features a superb central turn from Cillian Murphy as the school’s eponymous, exhausted head Steve, around whom the propulsive, bittersweet drama revolves.

Standout performances come from Cillian Murphy and Jay Lycurgo

Premiering at Toronto, Steve will have a limited theatrical release in the UK and US on September 19 before moving to Netflix. The streamer may well be hoping for awards attention, particularly for Murphy (reuniting here with his Peaky Blinders and Small Things Like These director Mielants) although it is likely to make the strongest impact on home soil. Murphy will certainly attract audiences, who should also be drawn by the strength of Porter’s narrative. (This is Porter’s second adaptation of the year; his debut novel, Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, having been turned into a feature starring Benedict Cumberbatch which premiered at Sundance and will next play the London Film Festival.)

In adapting his book, screenwriter Porter has switched the focus from original student protagonist Shy to middle-aged Steve, the institution’s founder and head. While this could be read as a calculated move to create a meatier role for Murphy – with whom Porter collaborated on the 2021 stage play of Grief and film, music and art installation hybrid All Of This Unreal Time – the narrative switch works well, allowing the (mostly) more-grounded adult to become the emotional lynchpin around which this often chaotic drama revolves.

The action takes place over the course of a single day, as Steve and his colleagues Amanda (Tracey Ullman), Jenny (Emily Watson, who won a Berlin Silver Bear for her role in Small Things Like These) and Shona (Simbi Aijkawo, aka rapper Little Simz) attempt to manage the boisterous students while also hosting a local news crew, who are shooting a segment for regional BBC programme Points West. The grainy film footage shot by the team, in which they interview the boys and the staff, is inserted throughout, and provides both contextual insights into the different personalities at play, and welcome moments of relative calm amid the mayhem.

And for Steve, it is near-constant mayhem. When we meet him, he is recording rambling notes on his Dictaphone and, as the day progresses,he must break up fights – often between the volatile Riley (Joshua J Parker) and the provocative Jamie (Luke Ayres) – deal with the sexually inappropriate behaviour of Tyrone (Tut Nyuot), teach and check in with his staff. And that’s all before a board meeting in which the team are unceremoniously told their funding is being withdrawn and the building sold.

The film is very firmly set at the tail-end of a Conservative government which has decimated social services. Even with few remaining pupils, the school’s passionate, dedicated staff are overstretched and under-resourced. Moments in which the Points West team are thrilled to capture footage of the boys behaving badly, or cross boundaries by filming in their rooms, also speaks to how much of the media (and, by extension, the public) views institutions like Stanton Wood. Despite his incredible intentions, Steve is only human, and there’s only so much he can do to support kids like 17-year-old Shy (Jay Lycurgo, a former Screen Star Of Tomorrow), who is in very real danger of slipping through the cracks of this broken system.

Cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert captures the raw, hanging-by-a-thread nature of life at Stanton Wood with immersive, hand-held camerawork, while regular close-ups of Murphy’s face reveal the shadows of fatigue, the deep lines of worry. The score from Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow is equally as intuitive, moving from the almost-there background music of the opening scenes to more frantic, often intrusive tones as the action heats up and temperatures rise.

While the entire cast impresses, standout performances come from Murphy and Lycurgo. They make it clear that Steve and Shy are two sides of the same coin, both shaped by past trauma and finding it almost impossible to exorcise their demons. While Shy finds some release in drum and bass music, often played at ear-splitting volume over the action – including during a jaw-dropping, technically masterful climactic high-speed drone sequence – Steve turns to alcohol to numb his pain.

Lycurgo captures both Shy’s cocky bravado and the overwhelming depression which is threatening to engulf him. Murphy puts in a weathered, naturalistic turn, his addled Steve running on pure adrenaline, torn between his commitment to these lads and the daily battle he is having to fight – with himself as well as outside forces – just to give them the help they so desperately need.