Steve is about a man of the same name, played by Cillian Murphy, who is one of the headteachers of a reform school for mentally ill and troubled boys. It follows the events of one day, as we get to see the perspectives of both the students and teachers, as the school gets news that it will be closing. As far as the main premise goes, the big twist with it is that Steve is battling his own mental health issues.

I would say that this film does a really good job of capturing the chaos of a school like this. I was stressed out for the vast majority of the runtime, which the film was clearly trying to do, and in a way that I haven’t really been before. I felt the stress of the headteachers, just trying to get everyone to calm down and, well, behave. One thing that helped with this was that a decent portion is shot by a bunch of in-movie documentary filmmakers, so a lot of it plays like a documentary.

Cillian Murphy delivers a really good performance, as always, and really truly captures a person who is selfless, but also has huge struggles of his own. He hides it pretty well from the other characters, but as a viewer, it’s pretty easy to see all the hidden emotion that is built up inside of him, and all of the self-control it takes to keep that emotion inside, and not let it come out. He was easily the standout of the movie for me.

Steve also has a really good ending, even though I probably wouldn’t say it was super earned. It’s a climax for sure, but one that fits the film perfectly, and one that was pretty emotionally poignant. For all the issues that I had with the movie, which I’m about to get into, it definitely ended on a high note.

The main negative with this film has to be that, while I said it captures the chaos of this type of school quite well, it’s also too chaotic. Really, what I mean by that is that it doesn’t ever allow the film to slow down or truly hone in on itself to add moments of relief or emotion, so I had a really hard time getting emotionally invested because I was too wrapped up in the chaos of it all. It almost felt like its main focus was to just be a stressful experience for the majority of the film, but at the same time, it did try to be something else by being emotionally poignant, when it unfortunately wasn’t, at least not until the end. I find movies that try to be more of an “experience,” such as another movie that came out this year, Warfare, to be a bit repetitive and uninteresting. It would have been fine if it had gone this route; it just wouldn’t have been for me, but it really didn’t - it did try to be both more of an experience and a traditional narrative, which didn’t work at the end of the day.

It’s also undoubtedly too short, which is weird for me to say, because I find a lot of movies nowadays to have the complete opposite problem. There isn’t enough time spent with the characters of the film, and really only two of them actually get any valuable screentime, being of course, the main character, as well as one of the students named Shy, whom I immediately somehow recognized was played by one of the criminals at the very beginning of The Batman (I know, weird sidenote). I’ve already talked about Steve, but Shy is a character who has struggles with depression and anger, and was the only student that I actually cared about (as bad as that sounds, it’s because the movie didn’t give me a chance to care about anyone else). Shy is the character who gets the big climactic moment at the end, and while it was pretty emotionally poignant, it could have been significantly more so if there had been more time spent with him prior.

For all my negatives with Steve, it does end on a high note that I really, really liked and found pretty emotionally impactful. I also really liked the message of the movie, which was pretty much put in stone with the film’s last message, which was simply just text on screen, but neat nonetheless. While it wasn’t one of the most disappointing movies of the year by any means, because I didn’t have particular expectations going in, I just saw a much better movie, which really kind of frustrated me at the end of the day.