‘Steve’ Review: Tim Mielants and Cillian Murphy Redefine Empathy in the “Troubled Student” Genre [B+] TIFF

It feels like we’ve been telling stories of well-meaning teachers and troubled students since the beginning of time. Everyone is aware that public school systems are notoriously underfunded and under-resourced, especially those that seek to support children who come from hard circumstances. Several films have traded against this fact, Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, and Precious among them, leaving a path so well-trod that you can’t help but wonder if there’s any fresh ground. A more sobering question: if there is some small patch of fresh ground, will another film make a difference?

Steve, the new film by Tim Mielants, world premiering in the Platform section of the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, believes so. Set in 1996, Steve centers on Stantonwood Manor, a British “last chance” reform school regarded by everyone as a dilapidated failure. Everyone, that is, except for the overworked, passionate teachers, led by headmaster Steve (Cillian Murphy). Steve’s affable and compassionate personality allows him to rally the teachers and crack through the students’ roughened exteriors. Yet, he is not without his own demons, particularly a hidden drug addiction. Steve’s handle on his students, his teachers, and his sanity is tested mightily by a school day from the pits of hell, all captured by a documentary crew with dubious intentions.

Mielants’s first step in remixing the admittedly tired “troubled student” genre through that dubious documentary crew. A significant portion of Steve looks like a 90s-era documentary, complete with analog, VHS-like aesthetics. It’s through this vantage point that we see what exactly the school is up against: a political and cultural environment that treats it like a tossaway oddity rather than a learning and rehabilitation institution. The crew is almost gleeful in capturing the worst of Stantonwood’s students, whipping around as they shout and fight in the halls. The host’s commentary strives for objectivity in its careful modulation between pity and disappointment, but there is no empathy, looking and sounding much like the ‘90s tabloid show Hard Copy. Disdain permeates the footage, from the condescending questions asked of the students and staff, to the host and director violating protocol to search the boys’ rooms for incriminating evidence and behavior.

The antidote to the documentary crew’s callousness (and outright negligence, in the case of one student) is Mielant’s gentle but inventive conception of the school’s truth. He often counteracts the documentary’s narrative with moments that the crew doesn’t have access to, and likely wouldn’t be interested in anyway. These moments show the full breadth of the students’ experiences, the bad, the bad, and the messy tangles of the two. We see two students bash each other and knock Steve over through the documentary’s eyes, but then see Steve offer stern but thoughtful outreach that diffuses the angry tension between them. There are also times when the documentary and “real life” are pretty well-aligned, like when the boys make vulgar gestures at the crew through a window. However, while the documentary presents them as rambunctious cretins, we see camaraderie and good-natured (if still vulgar) fun. 

Mielant doesn’t limit what and how he captures the school outside of the confines of the documentary, though. He is open about how he examines the students’ and teachers’ challenges. We spend the most time with Shy (Jay Lycurgo), a charismatic but depressed boy whose parents have washed their hands of him. He wavers between the quick-witted kid who playfully climbed atop Steve’s car at the start of the film, and the distant, vacant boy who’s also quick to nearly-violent outbursts. Mielant’s considerate approach grants a remarkably well-rounded portrait of him, while also highlighting how the system actively limits that perspective for everyone else outside the school. After all, it’s much easier to understand a student calling a politician a “cunt” to his face than his suicidal ideation.

Of course, Steve is ultimately about its titular character. (The novella by Max Porter that the film is adapted from, however, is focused on Shy.) Mielants saves his most inventive directorial flourishes for conveying the headmaster’s own emotional crises, frequently playing with Steve’s perspective. When Steve is lying on the ground during a teacher’s meeting, Mielant shoots it in first-person, so we can experience how off-kilter he feels in that moment. (He lies on the ground as a recuperative exercise following a car accident.) When a fire alarm goes off near the end of this remarkably taxing day, Mielants replaces the blaring sound with high-pitched ringing to convey Steve desperately trying to blot out the sensory input. 

The most impressive sequence has the camera moving across the grounds during a contentious meeting with the school psychiatrist, Jenny (Emily Watson), who gently suggests that Steve is losing grip of the school. As Steve spirals during that meeting, we spiral with him. Again, empathy is the chief goal. Mielants allows us to understand why Steve relies on painkillers to function throughout the day. He also shows us why Steve is so passionate about these students despite his own troubles that, theoretically, make him ill-equipped to operate in such a delicate environment. But that is precisely the point of Mielants’ work: subverting what we assume about places like Stantonwood. 

Subversion requires trust, so it’s no surprise that Mielants would seek out Cillian Murphy, with whom he worked on Peaky Blinders and Small Things Like These. Murphy appears to trust him equally as much, as he turns in one of his broadest, most open-hearted performances to date. While he foregrounds Steve’s fervent compassion and genuine connection to his students, Murphy also lets hints of nervy mania crackle through his wildly expressive eyes and movements, down to his fingertips. He has the discipline to keep that energy in check so that it never feels like a threat to Shy and his other students, even though they’re readily capable of wounding him. Jay Lycurgo is an excellent opposing force in that right and in his own, rendering Shy’s fragile mental health with an aching, raw honesty. (The closeups of his face are among the film’s best scenes.) 

Steve doesn’t necessarily break new ground in the “troubled student” genre. However, it does offer something different. Mielants bypasses the risks of triteness or exploitation by creatively and thoughtfully grounding us in who the people of Stantonwood are, rather than what they represent. Even better, he acknowledges the triteness and exploitation naturally built into the genre at the same time, without making excuses for anyone involved. It may not be new ground, but it’s a refreshing change of pace through well-worn territory.

Grade: B+

This review is from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival where Steve had its world premiere. The film will be in select theaters on September 19 and on Netflix October 3.