Steve review: everybody wants to be saved
There’s a moment in Steve, Netflix’s quiet gut-punch of a drama starring Cillian Murphy, when the camera lingers on a boy’s face as he’s asked by a documentary crew to describe himself in three words. He pauses, searching for something. Averting his eyes from the camera lens, “Depressed,” he finally says. “Angry. Bored.” The boy — called Shy — scratches a wound that he alone does not live with; the other boys around him, too, struggle to soothe the same stinging ache.
Directed by Tim Mielants and written by Max Porter from his own novella Shy, Steve unfolds over a single, long day at Stanton Wood, a reform school for troubled boys in the mid-1990s. The film centres on the headteacher Steve (Murphy), but it is as much about Shy, the boy he’s trying to reach. Their lives are deeply.intertwined and the opening scene sets the tone of how well they get along with each other. Underneath their bantering and joking, we soon see that both are fighting ghosts—Steve his guilt and exhaustion, Shy his fury and despair. Both are desperately trying not to drown.
The film within the film
Much of Steve takes place through the lens of a visiting documentary crew filming a profile of the school. Their presence creates a jarring duality: we are watching people who are already being watched. Teachers and students give interviews; we see microphones, camera lights, a boom pole swinging awkwardly into frame. The documentary crew is not prompted by any altruistic vision in making a film about juvenile delinquents; the crew is just there to cover yet another assignment. Meanwhile the onus of following Steve navigate one on ones with the boys after every breakdown and brawl is on us. Essentially the crew do not see the work Steve and his colleagues constantly do to help these kids, we do.
When the crew asks Shy about his life, he stares past the camera. His face is defiant but trembling. For a brief second, he looks like he might cry, but he doesn’t. He’s too used to being looked at without being understood. The film keeps returning to this paradox: that sometimes being seen can feel like exposure, and sometimes like salvation. The act of witnessing — by the camera, by us, by Steve himself — becomes both a wound and a lifeline.
That layer of observation gives the film its texture. The handheld camerawork mirrors the combustible energy of the place; the frame jitters and jolts, like any of the angry, young men trying to contain too much feeling. Or like Steve himself. But the camera motion is never showy for its own sake. It evokes how life feels when you’re living in permanent crisis — when your head is swimming but you need to move on to put out one fire after another.
Steve, who runs the school, is a portrait of weary compassion. Murphy plays him as someone who’s spent years holding everyone else together while quietly crumbling inside. He’s dedicated to his students, believes in them fiercely, and yet there’s a quiet panic behind his eyes. He nicks into the restroom to pop pills. He is trying to kick the drink but of course it's hiding in corners for emergencies. His colleague Amanda checks if he is doing physio for his back. His hands tremble as he smokes. His voice catches when he’s trying to explain why the school matters. He is trying — truly trying — but the trying is wearing him thin.
Murphy gives one of his most restrained performances here. Gone is the charismatic volatility of Oppenheimer or the mad intensity of Peaky Blinders. He is an ordinary man with no overtly extraordinary qualities. Yet, the battles he takes on for these boys shunned by society are devastating. You feel the weight of decades of care work in his slumped shoulders and strained back — the cost of being the one who stays calm when everyone else falls apart.
Steve is surrounded by colleagues who care, too — teachers, counselors, a social worker — but the film shows how even empathy can become a form of attrition. There’s a scene where he lashes out in frustration, his voice cracking, and you realize it’s not just about the kids; it’s about the slow erosion of his own belief that he can make a difference.
What Steve captures with painful precision is something few films bother to: what happens to people who care too much for too long.
At first glance, the film seems to be about troubled youth, but it also makes a commentary on loneliness — the kind that creeps into your bones, and makes you feel unseen even when surrounded by people. The boys at Stanton Wood may be labelled “delinquents,” but the film never reduces them to their outbursts. Steve and his colleagues consider them as children who have simply run out of ways to ask for love. So they give them all the love they can muster and even when they cross the line, they are forgiven after serious warning.
Shy, played remarkably by Jay Lycurgo, embodies this. His silence is volcanic; when he does erupt, it’s with a violence that feels like grief turned outward. But beneath that fury is a longing to be known. He’s seeking redemption but at a deeper level he is also looking for reassurance that his life is not a lost cause. That is an assurance Steve desperately tries to exemplify for all the boys.
This theme finds eerie resonance in recent psychological research, like a 2025 study by Nicolasa María Durán Palacio and colleagues, which explored the relationship between empathy, emotional self-efficacy, and behavioural difficulties in juvenile offenders. The study found that empathy can reduce aggression and foster social strengths but only if individuals have the ability to regulate their own emotions. Without that self-control, empathy can collapse under the weight of frustration.
Watching Steve, you see this theory come alive. Steve’s empathy is vast, but his emotional self-efficacy — the ability to keep himself steady — is now failing. Shy’s capacity for connection is buried under rage he doesn’t know how to manage. Both suffer from what psychologists might call “empathic burnout,” the point where caring turns into a source of pain rather than healing.
Hence the film touches upon the delicate balance required to save oneself while caring for others.
There’s very little sentimentality in Steve. The film understands that hope, in environments like Stanton Wood, is not a shining light but a fragile matchstick bright for a moment, then flickering against the wind.
The script resists the typical “inspirational teacher” arc. There are no dramatic speeches that fix everything, no miracles. Instead, hope shows up in quiet, invisible ways: in a teacher who chooses not to give up on any of his students; in a boy who, for once, responds to this teacher rather than choosing violence; and in the film's climax when it seems it is too late to save anyone.
Although the school has dedicated teachers with rare capacity for empathy and love, they are trapped in a system that keeps breaking apart.
The school itself is under threat of closure, its staff is overworked, its students still labeled as criminals. The brilliance of the film is to convey that everyone here is trying to do the right thing, but the machinery of the world keeps grinding that effort into dust.
This is where the psychological lens becomes most haunting. If empathy without regulation leads to collapse, then the collapse of institutions that sustain care — schools, social services, communities — means collapse on a massive scale. Steve is not a personal tragedy but a social one.
A film about being seen
The film forces us to face a vital question: is acknowledging another's pain enough or must it be followed by understanding, by love, by action?
For Shy, being seen is dangerous; it makes him vulnerable. For Steve, being seen is painful; it exposes the cracks in his façade of control. For us, the viewers, being made to see — truly see — forces recognition of our own complicity in our approach to corrective institutions.
Murphy’s performance anchors all of this. He has the rare ability to make stillness eloquent. The tiniest flicker — a half-smile, a glance away — communicates volumes. There’s something heartbreakingly human about watching him try to summon patience he no longer has, to offer calm he no longer feels.
He doesn’t dominate scenes yet he haunts them.
Lycurgo matches him beautifully, his face a battleground between defiance and yearning. The supporting cast — Tracey Ullman and others — add shades of compassion and fatigue, forming a portrait of a community trying, failing, and trying again.
Style and substance in balance
Visually, Steve is raw. Mielants favours natural light and close framing, giving the film a near-documentary authenticity even outside the “filming” sequences. There are moments when the camera feels like it’s breathing alongside the characters — shaky, and intimate.
The visual chaos mirrors the emotional chaos perhaps too well. But just when the intensity threatens to overwhelm, the film offers relief — a lingering shot of an empty field, sunlight glancing off a window, silence after yelling match. Those quiet frames are where the film breathes, and where its thesis takes root: that silence, too, can be a form of care.
The human need to be saved
If Steve leaves you unsettled, it’s because it reaches into something primal: the fact that no one, not even the strong, truly wants to be alone.
We all carry our private wars. But what we crave most after a long siege is the belief that someone else might step in, not to fix us, but to remind us that we’re worth fixing.
That’s the film’s final truth, people fight their own demons every day, but they still yearn for someone to say, “You’re worth the fight.” That yearning is not weakness but in fact it’s the core of being human.
Steve doesn’t promise redemption; it promises recognition. It suggests that being seen, even briefly, might be enough to make life bearable. That, in a world that keeps looking away, might be the most radical act of hope.
And yet, what the film ultimately reveals is not just the chaos of brokenness, but the stubborn human instinct to hope anyway — to believe that someone might see us and still decide we’re worth saving.