“Steve”

Director Tim Mielants aims for something intimate, bruising, and profound with “Steve,” his ambitious but ultimately ineffective misfire. Based on Max Porter’s novella “Shy,” the film wants to be a powerful meditation on mental health, broken institutions, and the fragile lives of troubled teenage boys. Instead, it is a muddled, frustrating, and strangely hollow experience that never finds its footing.

Set in the 1990s, the story takes place over the course of a single fraught day at a dilapidated reform school. Cillian Murphy plays Steve, a teacher trying desperately to hold together everything from the school’s funding to a classroom of rowdy boys to his own crumbling mental state. Meanwhile, a troubled teen named Shy (Jay Lycurgo) spirals deeper into his own internal chaos. With a documentary film crew circling the school and tensions rising, there’s a growing sense of dread that something is about to break.

All of that should make for a gripping character study, but the storytelling here is messy. The film constantly shifts between vérité-style interviews, fly-on-the-wall realism, and dreamy internal moments, yet none of it gels. The structure is confusing, the pacing sluggish, and worst of all, we never really get to know the boys. They drift in and out of scenes like symbols rather than characters, which makes it hard to care when things go wrong.

That disconnect is what really sinks the film. The story wants to be about empathy, care, and saving people on the brink, but it fails to connect the audience to the very people it’s asking them to feel for. The performances are solid, with Murphy being reliably good and Lycurgo doing what he can with a thinly written role, but they’re working uphill against a screenplay that’s more interested in mood than clarity.

There are glimpses of a better film buried underneath, like one that treats its young characters with more dimension and tells its story with sharper focus. Sadly, “Steve” never quite gets there.

By: Louisa Moore