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Cillian Murphy's latest film, Steve, arrived on Netflix yesterday. Before this, it already had a premiere at the 50th annual Toronto International Film Festival on September 5, 2025. Following a couple of weeks, it was given a theatrical release in limited theaters in the United Kingdom.
It is a moving story based on a 2023 novella written by Max Porter, who also wrote the screenplay. The kind of moving that The Wall Street Journal's John Anderson thinks:
"If one isn’t moved, one should check one’s pulse."
Cillian Murphy's performance was widely praised in this latest Netflix flick, which also brings some influences from a 2006 film that the actor played the lead in, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, as he recently shared in a recent interview with Variety.
However, that isn't an influence from the story but the direction that went in there, thanks to Ken Loach, the English filmmaker who directed the film. Regarding this, Cillian Murphy says, when asked about the 'Loachian' feel in Steve:
"The location was effectively one location, so I thought, why not shoot everything in sequence like Ken does? Because it’s very, very rare you get to do it. And when I did it on “Barley” like he does it for every film, it was life-changing because you just went on this journey with this character in order, and it was purely instinctual and you acquired the emotional information as you went along. And every scene was a rehearsal for the next scene. So I stole that technique from him."
He also shared about this scene from Steve about the school getting sold. The film uses another technique used by Ken Loach, where the protagonists and antagonists are kept separated and not put face-to-face until the scene demands. That gives the film more realism on the screen.
Cillian Murphy's character was inspired by a revolutionary Irish leader in the Ken Loach film
In The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Cillian Murphy played Damien O'Donovan, a fictional character inspired by a real-life character called Ernie O'Malley, a writer and an Irish republican. He was a major figure in the Irish Civil War, which stretched from June 28, 1922, to May 24, 1923.
Damien begins as a normal person living in County Cork and is soon leaving to study medicine in London. However, certain events prevent him from doing so, and he joins an Irish Republican Army brigade led by his brother Teddy O'Donovan, played by Pádraic Delaney.
The film was both a critical and a commercial success. Currently, it is sitting at 90% fresh on the review aggregator platform Rotten Tomatoes and earned $25.7 million on a $25.7 million budget. On top of that, it became the most independent film ever released in Ireland.
For his performance as Damien O'Donovan, Cillian Murphy was nominated for the British Independent Film Awards, the European Film Awards, and the Irish Film & Television Awards.
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