MIDNIGHT REVIEWS Steve Movie Review

It’s not your own time you’re wasting (see what I did there?)

Matthew D. Smith also has a podcast he co-hosts with Leslie Wai. You can find it here.

Steve (1hr 33mins)

Directed by: Tim Mielants

Featuring: Cillian Murphy, Tracy Ullman, Jay Lycurgo

Synopsis: Steve (Murphy) is headteacher of a school for reform children, battling just to get through the day. Shy (Lycurgo), one of his students, has recently had a troubling phone call and is struggling to get through his own day too.

Review: Teachers can get a bit of a bad rap. It’s not helped when popular culture depicts them incorrectly (I’m looking at you, British ‘Get Into Teaching’ adverts, where you show teachers leaving the school at the same time as the children). So it was with trepidation that I flicked across to Netflix’s Steve, a low-key Cillian Murphy offering after Oppenheimer’s bombast.

Grammar mistake ten seconds in (‘Netflix Presents’? Is that someone’s name?) notwithstanding, Steve plays things realistically, particularly in its title cards showing the day slipping away without characters realising it.

Forget your ordinary primary or secondary school though. Steve is set at a reform school for those who’ve done something seriously wrong, or are on the brink of doing so. This is a place of swift, hard escalation; where an argument over nicking someone’s lunch turns into a full-blown fight featuring fire extinguishers. And teachers are the only ones there to stem the tide.

The most authentic depiction of teaching I’ve seen.

We have Jamie (Luke Ayres), loud, obnoxious, terribly good at reading people and using this to irritate them. There’s Nabeel (Ahmed Ismail), super smooth ladies’ man who can understand why people think he could be a model. And then there’s Shy.

Shy, as the name might suggest, spends most of his time under his hood, contact not something on his Christmas list. But his emotional intelligence is off the charts and there’s the sense that this isn’t the usual him, and that if he didn’t receive a certain phone call this morning, things would be very different. It doesn’t help that there’s a film crew visiting for the day (“Describe your colleagues in three words”), coinciding with a visit from the local MP (a short scene that ends rather spectacularly). In the midst of all this, Steve tries to keep things together both inside the school and inside his own mind.

Picked up ably by the performances.

The first question I had was whether Murphy or Tracy Ullman had done teacher training. This is, without doubt, the most authentic depiction of teaching I’ve seen. From the late-night get-togethers where teachers finally let their hair down to those unfortunate but real instances where staff have so much going on, that their list of essentials goes into double figures, Steve fully captures what it’s like to try and educate young people, particularly when it’s young people that don’t necessarily feel like they want to be taught.

It’s also, coincidentally, the first film I’ve seen that actually uses a drone shot effectively whilst also highlighting the strengths of this relatively new piece of camera tech. Snapshots provide a real sense of what it’s like to be in this place not just on one particularly stressful day, but at any time in a school that could close any day now.

Despite, or perhaps because of, all the shenanigans going on, the narrative is rather slight. There’s the obvious symbolism (Shy having a literal backpack full of rocks; Shy and Steve sharing similar issues despite completely different backgrounds), but the emotional heft these themes struggle to carry is picked up ably by the performances.

Murphy is great not just in the moments where Steve is beleaguered and put-upon, but also in extreme close-ups where you can really get the sense of a million things running through his head at once. Lycurgo, relatively unknown but already collecting copious TV and film credits, is superb as Shy. Sharing the screen with Murphy, the most emotionally powerful moments of Steve are in those extreme close-ups; the straining as each character fights against something they feel they’ll never beat, something they can’t quite explain to those they need to explain it to.

Whilst Steve is marketed as a tense, Uncut Gems-esque thrill ride through a terrible day at a reform school, really it’s about something much deeper and murkier; a chase for something you can’t quite have, and the oh so human response to be to chase it anyway.

Steve is currently available to stream on Netflix.

Matthew D. Smith likes to overshare his views on movies and TV shows whenever and wherever he can. Indulge him, and follow him on Twitter or enjoy the podcast he co-hosts with Leslie Wai.