Producers: Alan Moloney and Cillian Murphy   Director: Tim Mielants   Screenplay: Max Porter   Cast: Cillian Murphy, Tracey Ullman, Jay Lycurgo, Simbi Ajikawo, Emily Watson, Roger Allam, Joshua J. Parker, Luke Ayres, Tut Nyuot, Douggie McMeekin, Youssef Kerkour, Araloyin Oshumremi, Tom Moya, Ahmed Ismail. Joshua Barry, Archie Fisher, Ben Lloyd-Hughes, Priyanga Burford, George Fouracres, Marcius Garvey and Ruby Ashbourne-Serkis Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C

In his second collaboration with Belgian director Tim Mielants, Cillian Murphy gives a performance as busy and frenetic as the one he offered in their previous film, “Small Things Like These,” was calm and measured.  In “Things” he was a shy, reserved man who suffers a crisis of conscience when he observes abuses in one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene convents.  In “Steve” he plays the titular teacher in a British reform school for troubled—and troubling—boys. 

The film is based on Max Porter’s 2023 novel “Shy,” which was told from the perspective of one of the inmates; Steve was a lesser character.  Now he’s become the focus of the drama, and Shy (Jay Lycurgo) the most notable of his charges, all of whom are at Stanton Wood, a run-down estate housing adolescents with mental health issues and a propensity for violence that’s their last chance to avoid prison.

The film is set on a single, and as it turns out eventful, day in 1996.  Steve meets Shy, a thoughtful kid, on the grounds as he comes in to work, facing a meeting with a couple of representatives of the school’s Trustees (Ben Lloyd-Hughes and Ruby Ashbourne-Serkis), a visit from a news crew led by Kamila (Priyanga Burford)—which leads many segments, like Steve’s introduction at the start, to be cast as documentary footage—and a session in which the local MP will come by for a talk with the students.  None of them goes well.

The Trustees announce that they’ve decided to sell the place and shut the operation down at the end of term, shocking Steve and his equally dedicated colleagues, headmistress Amanda (Tracey Ullman), newbie Shola (Simbi Ajikawo) and counselor Jenny (Emily Watson).  The TV crew note the place’s cost at a time of governmental budget cuts while observing the students’ lack of discipline, shown in their acting out for the camera in interviews as well as their propensity to go at one another physically—as in an early row between reedy Riley (Joshua J. Parker) and chubby Jamie (Luke Ayres).  And during the meeting with pompous, cliché-spouting Sir Hugh Montague Powell (Roger Allam), Shy poses an insulting question that makes the man immediately cut off the session and depart in a huff after brusquely informing the news crew to use none of the embarrassing footage.

All of which—as well as having to deal with a report that one of the students, Tarone (Tut Nyuot), has been accused of accosting Shola—takes a serious toll on Steve, a recovering alcoholic still traumatized by a road accident in which a girl died.  As he grows increasingly frazzled, Shy becomes more and more withdrawn—he’s just been told by his mother that she and her husband intend to have nothing more to do with him.

The day’s crush of events—rowdy classroom moments, individual interviews, chaotic confrontations in hallways, introspective interludes periodically interrupted by captions indicating the passage of time–is filmed by cinematographer Robert Heyvaert in a jittery, hand-held style and edited by Danielle Palmer hyperkinetically, with a score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow that’s sparingly used but, when it is, coming across as brutally percussive.  The heightened realism reaches a fever pitch in a soccer game played in the rain, with the camera careening around the action wildly, even turning upside-down.  And throughout Paki Smith’s production design and Alison McCoch’s emphasize bleakness and depression.

The emotional trajectories of Steve and Shy come to a head in the finale, as the teacher descends into drunken stupor and the boy gives in to his deepening despair.  A final shot of Steve returning to the bosom of his family the next day offers little respite from the prevailing gloom, despite a tape Steve’s left for Shola that offers assessments of the individual boys that are excruciatingly empathetic and hopeful even in the face of impending disaster.

Mielants and his collaborators invest the film with passionate fury over society’s failure to give abused, discarded children the help they need, with the cast, both young and old, sparing nothing.  But the film’s style is so hysterically over the top that it dilutes its power rather than enhancing it.  The same is true of Murphy’s performance, which is obviously committed, but to such an extent that it comes to feel showy. 

“Steve” is the latest in a long line of films about teachers struggling to find ways to reach apparently intractable students, some schmaltzy and others brutally realistic.  It’s neither the best nor the worst of them.  While its intensity is unmistakable, the flashiness of its approach ironically acts against the effect it wants to have.