For fans of the mannered, ersatz verité of “The Bear” comes the new film “Steve,” from Belgian director Tim Mielants. The Netflix film, about a British reform school for troubled teenage boys, swaps the murmuring, sweaty-browed chefs of “The Bear” for murmuring, sweaty-browed instructors charged with the care of a handful of rambunctious adolescents. The stakes are higher than dinner service, but the net effect is the same: “Steve” is another stylish sham.
It’s an enervating sit, a film manically hustling to distract its audience from a void at its center. Cillian Murphy plays the titular Steve, a beloved teacher at a controversial school that uses public funds to house violent and antisocial boys in a shabby old mansion. There, somehow, Steve and his coworkers hope to set their students on a course toward productive citizenship. It’s 1996 and a camera crew for a news program has descended on the school, looking for either an exposé of gross mismanagement or a sensitive portrait of life-saving intervention.
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It’s thus a big day for the institution, but Mielants and screenwriter Max Porter — adapting from his own novel, “Shy” — aren’t content to leave it at that. Also happening in this harried 24 hours: the dismaying announcement that the school will be shutting down in six months’ time, the suicidal ideation of a student, and a teacher in recovery drifting into relapse as he processes an ornate trauma. It’s quite a lot to handle, but “Steve” figures that there is profundity to be found in that loud and antic jumble, caught in tight closeup.
It figures wrong. The film is trying quite hard to be a bracing and immersive depiction of rehabilitation’s hard toil. But “Steve” is instead a pantomime, an offhanded approximation of work that fails to convincingly show us the actual work. (Much like “The Bear”!) We never really see Steve or his colleagues doing what they keep insisting is so important. Pedagogy is only hinted at on the sidelines of the picture that Mielants actually wants to capture, one of carefully orchestrated chaos strenuously posed as realism.
Maybe I’m a curmudgeon, but to my mind most of the hastily rendered kids of “Steve” seem without redemption. They’re noisy, obnoxious, cruel, one-dimensional avatars of the film’s broadly gestured-toward social ills, shorthand sketches of adolescent male id. Steve’s ardor for them, and that of his colleagues — concerned, ill-defined women played with shaggy warmth by the great Tracey Ullman and Emily Watson — is explained to us but not really justified. Mielants keeps his movie’s volume at 11, robbing these kids (and their minders) of any quieter nuance that might humanize them.
It’s interesting that, in his adaptation, Porter has shifted the focus away from the novel’s central character, Shy — a particularly aggressive, soul-sick student — and onto Steve. Perhaps there was a thought somewhere in the production process that nestling alongside the teacher, rather than one of the kids, would be more marketable — “Steve” often plays as if someone is saying “this ain’t your granddaddy’s ‘Dangerous Minds.’” Whatever the arithmetic, “Steve” has chosen a leadenly dull protagonist. Murphy attacks the role with harrowed energy, but it’s all in service of a character who only exists as a clichéd logline: what if the fixer of broken youth is himself a little bit broken?
The true raison d’etre of “Steve” may simply be to showcase Mielants’ directorial flair. He keeps his camera awfully busy, jumping and darting as if it too is a tireless, unpredictable teenage boy. On occasion, especially as the film builds to its lugubrious finale, Mielants tries other tricks, simulating long tracking shots that seem to glide through the school and then out onto the grounds. Whether or not that’s actually what we’re watching — we can see the digital glint of some kind of computer manipulation in these sequences — the flourishes only serve to highlight what is lacking in the film. “Steve” is all dressed up, but goes nowhere.
There are so many pressing matters left on the table: issues of class, race, and gender that Mielants and Porter imply but never properly explore. The film’s chief sin is its effortful posture of compassion for the plight of these boys, and those like them in the real world. The film stages its riot of activity as hard-nosed honesty, but its portrait is ultimately as ginned-up and inexact as the fictional news broadcast’s lurid prying. “Steve” treats suicide as suspense, sexual assault as nuisance, addiction as plot twist, and education as an abstraction that doesn’t merit detail. Having spent a fruitless and frustrating day there, I’d close the school down, too.
Grade: C-
“Steve” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix will release the film in theaters on Friday, September 19, and it will stream on the platform starting on Friday, October 3.
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