Steve (2025)

Powerful Drama - Steve review by GI

A powerful, even at times brutal, drama infused with a dark humour and dominated by a fantastic, uninhibited performance from Cillian Murphy in the title role. He is the head teacher of a reform school for troubled teenage boys in the mid 1990s. Steve has an alcohol and substance abuse problem following a traumatic incident in his past but he manages the fine line between friend to the boys and authority figure trying to teach them something. The boys are wild and unpredictable with the ever present threat of emotional aggression when their lives become too difficult to cope. The focus is on one particular boy, Shy (Jay Lycurgo) who on the day on which the film takes place receives a call from his mother telling him she no longer wants anything to do with him. This rejection juxtapositions with Steve who also receives the news that the school is to be closed without any discussion. Steve's violent reaction and his downward spiral is mirrored by the emotional plunge that Shy takes at being abandoned. This ferocious drama takes place on the day a film crew is making a documentary about the school and the pompous local MP (Roger Allam) also visits adding the Steve's already fragile state. The rest of the cast are superb including Tracey Ullman as Steve's deputy and Emily Watson as the school psychologist. It's a story of attempted redemption and the film's end maybe uplifting or it maybe extremely sad, it's left for the viewer to interpret. A drama that is well worth checking out.

Lessons in Chaos - Steve review by griggs

There’s something mesmerising about watching a man hold chaos together with little more than nerves and nicotine. After the quiet conviction of Small Things Like These, Cillian Murphy returns with something far louder: a headmaster coming apart in real time, caught between duty, chaos, and his own bad habits.

Murphy's Steve, a reform school head in the mid-'90s, is brilliant at everything except coping. He lectures on control while losing his own, surrounded by boys who reflect his disorder in sharper, louder tones. When a TV crew arrives to film the school's "success," the whole façade buckles.

Equal parts bedlam and heartbreak, Steve finds rough poetry in failure. It's loud, jagged, and occasionally tender—a film that knows redemption is messy, that sometimes the lesson is simply surviving the day.