Steve

Belgian director Tim Mielants first worked with Cillian Murphy on Peaky Blinders, then directed him in Small Things Like These, which opened the Berlinale in 2024. Steve reunites them on a project Murphy also produced through his company Big Things Films: an adaptation by Max Porter of his own novella Shy, reworked for the screen around the head teacher who appears only at the edges of the book. It premiered in Toronto's Platform section in 2025 before its release on Netflix.

The film unfolds across a single day at Stanton Wood, a residential school for boys who have been failed by every other institution, as a documentary crew arrives and the school's funding comes into question. Murphy plays Steve as a man running on decency and caffeine, rarely still, forever negotiating. Tracey Ullman is his unflappable deputy, Little Simz a young teacher, and Jay Lycurgo gives a raw, watchful performance as Shy, a boy whose inner life breaks through the film in fragmented, impressionistic passages. Mielants shoots in restless handheld, keeping the camera inside the noise of corridors and classrooms, and cuts with a pace that makes the day feel both endless and dangerously short.

Reviews singled out the ensemble and the film's refusal to sentimentalise its boys; Lycurgo won the BIFA for Best Supporting Performance and the film was nominated for the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film. It is an angry, compassionate portrait of a system — and of the exhausted adults who keep it standing.