TIFF 2025: Steve Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Following poignant collaborations on Peaky Blinders and Small Things Like These, Cillian Murphy reunites with director Tim Mielants for Steve. Adapted to the screen by the novel’s original author, Max Porter, the film’s focus equivalently shifts between titular characters, focusing on Murphy’s Steve as opposed to Jay Lycurgo’s Shy. The film instead follows Steve, the head of a reform school for teenage boys, dealing with the overboiling complications behind mentoring these troubled boys and the external forces that struggle to find faith in their chances for rehabilitation.

Occurring over a singular day, Steve, while commencing his day at the school immediately exposes the audience to the explosive, aggressive, and at times irredeemable behavior transpiring between the complex camaraderie of these boys. Beyond the frustration, Steve’s passion and commitment to finding common ground and optimistic qualities among their destructive behavior, coupled with Murphy’s expressive and pragmatic performance, reaffirms his consistency and ability to portray these nuanced and overburdened characters – including his Academy Award-winning role in Oppenheimer. While the switch in perspectives from page to screen may be a puzzling decision, Murphy serves as the engaging force that drives the needed optimism for the hope that these boys can lead prospective lives despite their juvenile actions.

Shy’s neglected portrayal away from the limelight perfectly serves as a parallel to the boy’s unfortunate fading into the amalgamation of troubled behavior that encompassed the reform school. Upon discovering devastating personal news, these complex emotions swiftly brew inside him fester into depressing and dismissive conduct that frequently goes unnoticed in today’s society. Behind the subtlety expected from a complicated character is Lycurgo’s confidence and boldness to depict all of Shy’s internal turmoil among a group of intriguing young men, providing a promising future for a rising star.

While Lycurgo is intended to stand out as the most perturbed boy of this group, Porter establishes many of the individual pupils as agitated spirits that seem on the cusp of significant progress, aided by Steve’s patience and the visiting documentary crew to provide brief looks into their respective personalities. The novella’s initial focus on Shy would justify the lack of characterization of his peers. However, Steve’s focus in the film instead showcases his ineffectiveness for meaningful development in the work he is so passionate about doing, through the simple absence of consequential characterization scenes in this deficient 92-minute runtime. These brief glimpses into these unique personalities, and their respective struggles, are the film’s significant missed opportunities to show their potential and the school’s crucial reason to exist. Forced to juggle the numerous critics and deterrents to the success of this school is where much of Steve’s concentration unfortunately lies as it all boils over for him in this kinetic film.

In the end, Tim Mielants’ Steve is a deeply profound story that highlights the emotional complexity of a reform school, led by an unrelenting Cillian Murphy and rising star in Jay Lycurgo. However, the film lacks the important characterization that justifies the need to switch perspectives from the source material, as original writer Max Porter’s adaptation never quite delves into this group of troubled but promising boys that provided such initial intrigue.

still courtesy of Netflix

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Costa Christoulas

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