# Steve (2025) Review: Cillian Murphy's Longest School Day > Steve is Tim Mielants's one-day drama about a reform-school head teacher, with Cillian Murphy superb at the centre of a film that is sometimes as chaotic as its setting. Canonical: https://celluloidscore.com/reviews/steve-2025-review/ Published: 2026-07-23 Last updated: 2026-09-24 Author: Kaiser Khan — Founder & Editor Language: English Review basis: direct-viewing Spoilers: none Rating: 3.5/5 ## Verdict Yes, with reservations. Cillian Murphy fans and viewers drawn to intense, performance-led dramas will find plenty here, though its restless style and loose threads may frustrate some. ## Is Steve worth watching? **Yes, mainly for its performances. Steve is a tense, compassionate drama about one punishing day at a school of last resort, and Cillian Murphy gives the kind of wound-tight lead turn that makes even its messier stretches watchable.** Tim Mielants captures the noise and volatility of a place where every adult is improvising. The reservation is that the film sometimes mistakes chaos for depth, and several of its storylines feel sketched rather than finished. ## What is Steve about? Over the course of a single day in the 1990s, Steve (Cillian Murphy), the devoted head teacher of a reform school for teenage boys whom the rest of the system has given up on, tries to keep his students safe, his staff together and the institution itself afloat. Among the boys is Shy (Jay Lycurgo), a quiet, volatile teenager whose inner turmoil gives the film its second point of view. Steve, meanwhile, is carrying pressures of his own that he works hard to keep out of sight. [Steve](https://celluloidscore.com/movies/steve-2025/) is directed by Tim Mielants and adapted from Max Porter's short novel Shy. It is an English-language drama that runs 92 minutes, with Tracey Ullman, Little Simz, Douggie McMeekin, Youssef Kerkour, Emily Watson and Roger Allam in the supporting cast. It was released in September 2025. ## Cillian Murphy at full stretch Murphy has built a run of performances since Oppenheimer around men holding themselves together by force of will, and Steve is one of the most physically restless. He plays the head teacher as a man who runs on adrenaline and kindness in roughly equal measure, defusing fights, joking with boys who have learned not to trust adults, and fielding one crisis after another. What makes the performance affecting is how little he lets Steve show his own strain, so the moments when it leaks through land hard. The film reunites him with Mielants after Small Things Like These, and the two clearly share an interest in decent men worn thin by the institutions they serve. Here, though, the register is louder and more jittery than the hushed restraint of their earlier film. ## An ensemble that feels like a real staffroom Jay Lycurgo is excellent as Shy, conveying a mind in overdrive behind a guarded face, and the film is at its most original when it slips into his perspective. Tracey Ullman is a sharp, grounded presence as one of Steve's senior colleagues, and Little Simz brings warmth and steadiness as another member of a stretched staff. The boys themselves are played with rough, credible energy, and the ensemble creates a convincing sense of a community operating on goodwill and very little money. Mielants shoots much of the day handheld and close, with overlapping voices and sudden bursts of violence, so that the school feels permanently on the edge of boiling over. When it works, the effect is gripping: the audience shares Steve's feeling that nothing can be planned and everything can go wrong. ## Where the chaos costs clarity That same approach has limits. Many of the boys remain more types than characters, and the film's larger points about underfunding, public attitudes to troubled teenagers and the gap between institutions and individuals are sometimes delivered bluntly rather than dramatised. Some viewers will find the constant noise and movement exhausting rather than immersive. The adaptation also leaves a tension it never fully resolves. Porter's novella belonged to Shy, and the film divides its attention between him and Steve, which gives Murphy a showcase but means neither character's story gets quite the room it needs in 92 minutes. ## Who should watch Steve? It suits Cillian Murphy admirers, viewers who value performance-driven British and Irish drama, and anyone with an interest in education, youth services or the lives of teenagers failed by the system. At just over an hour and a half, it is a compact watch, but an intense one: expect strong language, aggression and violence, and themes of self-harm and mental illness. If it connects, try these next: - [Small Things Like These](https://celluloidscore.com/reviews/small-things-like-these-2024-review/), Mielants and Murphy's earlier, quieter study of a good man confronting a cruel institution. - [Breakfast on Pluto](https://celluloidscore.com/reviews/breakfast-on-pluto-2005-review/), for a very different showcase of [Cillian Murphy](https://celluloidscore.com/stars/europe/ireland/cillian-murphy/)'s range in an early lead role. - More from our [drama](https://celluloidscore.com/genres/drama/) shelf, for other character studies built around a single demanding role. ## The verdict Steve is an uneven but often powerful drama that captures the exhausting heroism of people who work with the young people everyone else has given up on. Its storytelling is scattered and its message sometimes blunt, yet Cillian Murphy and Jay Lycurgo give it a raw, beating heart. **Rating: 3.5/5** ## Related title - [Steve (2025)](https://celluloidscore.com/movies/steve-2025/) ## Editorial - [Editorial standards](https://celluloidscore.com/about/editorial-policy/) - [Report a correction](https://celluloidscore.com/about/corrections/)