Cillian Murphy's Steve review — A teacher, a camera, and the unbearable weight of broken boys

Steve, Netflix’s 90-minute drama, feels like a documentary caught between compassion and despair. It’s built as fiction but folds a documentary crew into the story itself, letting the camera become part of the tension. The result is a film that’s deliberately uncomfortable: the air hums with small sounds, ambient noises that refuse to fade, as if the world itself is listening in on pain.

Watching Steve is heavy and often unsettling. This is a story about troubled young men, about mental health and the absence of it, about medication, self-harm, and the fragile hope that someone might stay alive if someone else just tries hard enough.

Adapted from the novel Shy (named after one of the students), the movie chooses to title itself after Steve, the teacher at the heart of the school. That choice matters. It signals that while the boys’ stories remain important, the real weight of the film is what happens to the adult trying to hold them together.

Steve is not an unshakable savior. He's a man wrestling with his own demons while trying to keep other people’s from swallowing them whole.

A fictional school under real scrutiny

The setting is a secluded private school meant to rehabilitate boys with histories of violence, neglect, or severe behavioral issues. It is lush, expensive, almost idyllic at first glance. That's why a question voiced in the documentary footage stings:

“Are we paying for badly behaved young men to attend a luxury private school?”

The line, which appears on screen as the crew films, frames the tension between society’s hunger for punishment and the fragile attempts at healing that actually cost money and patience.

The documentary within the film adds a layer of meta commentary. We are constantly aware of the performance of care, of how institutions like to show their work while quietly failing the people inside. The camera is there, but it does not save anyone. It just witnesses.

Cillian Murphy’s shattering turn as Steve

Cillian Murphy carries the film with a performance that is both magnetic and quietly devastating. He plays Steve as a man stretched thin: gentle when he can be, fierce when he has to be, but clearly breaking apart. The boys need stability, yet he is barely holding on himself. Murphy gives Steve a weary tenderness that keeps him human even in his lowest moments.

What elevates Steve is how it avoids making its protagonist a saint. He is flawed, self-medicating, and burdened. The film’s power comes from watching someone who knows all the right things to say about survival but is fighting to believe them for himself.

Sound, silence, and the edge of despair

Director choices make the viewing experience claustrophobic and real. The sound design matters: doors creak, footsteps echo, voices fade in and out as if overheard. Silence is rarely safe; it's the kind that lets your own thoughts become too loud.

The pseudo-documentary framing heightens this effect. Every moment could be raw footage, nothing smoothed or softened for comfort.

Mental health here is not presented with tidy arcs. Depression, medication, suic*dal ideation, and addiction arrive as messy realities, not plot devices. The film needs (and has) a clear trigger warning: self-harm and suic*de attempts are integral, not peripheral.

When Shy walks out with stones in his backpack to drown himself, it's one of the film’s most harrowing sequences. His choice to break back into the building instead of the water is small but monumental. It is the thinnest thread of choosing life, even if it is just for another day.

An ending that refuses to resolve

After helping the boys and recording a personal tape for his colleague Shola, speaking tenderly about each student’s strengths, Steve retreats to his attic. The film ends there, offering no certainty.

Does he survive the night? Does he break? We are left in a suspended breath, mirroring the instability of real life where support systems crack and survival is never guaranteed.

There is a trace of hope. Shy turns back from death. Steve’s words plant dignity and identity in the boys. The film insists that even fragile hope matters. But this is not a comforting ending. It is a recognition that sometimes hope is only a thread, and yet that thread is still worth clinging to.

Final thoughts on watching something this heavy

Steve is powerful but emotionally draining. It's a reminder that helping others can destroy you if systems fail and that showing up matters even when you are broken yourself.

Anyone watching should know what they are walking into: a story steeped in depression, self-harm, and systemic failure, with a thin but real glimmer of hope. This is the kind of film that almost requires something heartwarming afterward, a gentle series or a comforting movie, to come back from its weight.

Rating with a touch of flair: 5 out of 5 fragile hopes clutched against despair.