Tim Mielants’ “Steve” is the kind of film that insists on its own intensity. It’s a suffocating experience.
Set in 1996, it opens with a chorus of adolescent yells in a posh boarding school for troubled boys, and from the first reel, the message is hammered in: these kids are chaos, the teachers are drowning, and we, the audience, are meant to feel the suffocation. We do, but not in the way Mielants intends.
Cillian Murphy, a magnificent actor, plays Steve, a man worn thin before the day even begins. He’s saddled with too much and suddenly needs to deal with a television crew documenting the madness inside the school until the last bell of the day rings. Steve responds not with resilience but with the familiar — booze and pills. Mielants and Murphy never let us forget his torment; they underline it in bold.
The children, supposedly the heart of the story, remain sketches—the film occasionally, and annoyingly, pauses for therapy sessions or an interview with the TV crew. One, who calls himself Shy (Jay Lycurgo), is given the tragic news that his mother is cutting him off completely. Astonishingly, the source novella was titled “Shy” and centered on him. The adaptation shifts the focus to Murphy’s frazzled teacher.
Mielants overdirects. Every shot is busy: drones swoop, handheld cameras, a faux-grainy filter tries to mimic analog video. Instead of energy, we get chaos. The boys fight, they yell, they fight again, and soon we’re no longer watching troubled kids—we’re watching a director who doesn’t trust us to notice trouble unless it’s screaming in our faces.
The actors do what they can. Tracey Ullman almost smuggles in a genuine character; Emily Watson does best with what’s conceived of her in the sessions with the boys; Murphy, for his part, carries his character’s collapse with a kind of grim poetry, though the script keeps piling up the clichés on him.
And then comes the ending, which decides it’ll go for sentimental uplift, and it’s so phony it feels like an insult. After so much sound and fury, the film wants to pat us on the head, as if to say, “See, it all meant something.” It didn’t. What stayed most in my head was the suffocating sense of being bullied by a director desperate for us to feel.