Bad teacher: "Steve"

The unprepossessingly named Steve arrives trailing a certain novelty: it's the first Cillian Murphy vehicle for some years that doesn't in any way work. The puzzle facing us is why that should be so. Its constituent parts, at least, were promising. This is the actor reuniting with Tim Mielants, the Belgian director who oversaw pivotal episodes of Peaky Blinders and last year's much-admired indie hit Small Things Like These; now the pair bring us a drama set during the footballing summer of 1996 that suggests a 21st century update of that moment's Dangerous Minds and Clockwork Mice (the underrated because rarely revived British variant with Ian Hart in the Michelle Pfeiffer role). There are two big differences. First, we're not stalking the inner city but are instead out and about at a Summerhall-like progressive school in the leafy Home Counties, operating as a last-chance saloon for teenagers who'd otherwise have been packed off to borstal. Second, Murphy's eponymous headmaster isn't your typical white knight, rather something of a screw-up himself, a dazed, indecisive pillpopper working under duress and at the very limit of his resources. Screenwriter Max Porter, adapting his own 2023 novel Shy, sets Steve's breakdown over the course of the one day, during which the school will be visited first by a TV news crew, catching some of the fallout on camera, then by a pompous Tory MP (Roger Allam, inevitably). Here's where the problems start: it's the kind of neat organising principle that can streamline a 300-page book, but which invariably starts to look contrived when projected on a big screen. Who's tending the diary at this school? Given that half the kids introduced in act one don't reappear until the very last minute, who's taking the register?

Small Things Like These, itself a literary adaptation, was considered, modulated and worked over, dogged in its recreation of period and mood. The appeal here for Mielants and Murphy had to have been to try something looser and off-the-cuff: the fact the film reaches cinemas less than a year after its predecessor would indicate a quick turnaround. (It's the kind of project that gets set in motion when your star is newly Oscar-minted and everyone's saying yes.) There are honourable intentions in play: a yen to pay tribute to those teachers (like the star's parents) who spend their careers working their arses off to give kids a good start, an openness to casting relatively untested, non-stage-schooled working-class performers, an urge to put something back into the British film industry rather than chase the A-list cheques that must now be dangled in Murphy's face on a daily if not hourly basis. The trouble is that the narrative framework these intentions have settled around is never remotely persuasive. At no point does Steve address why a school being run out of a country house in the middle of nowhere is teaching a mere eight pupils, and why a school housing teenagers earmarked as proven troublemakers is being overseen by four members of staff, one of whom is Tracey Ullman. I get Mielants and Murphy's desire to cut back on the logistics of filmmaking - to extricate themselves from the machine-tooled industry that their alma mater Peaky Blinders has become - but they've also accepted cuts to their operating budget that simply don't make sense in this context. The first thing that does make sense here is the film's inciting incident: representatives of the school trust showing up to notify everyone that the school will be closing in six months, further accelerating Steve's freefall. We're meant to think this is a terrible thing, but I'll wager most viewers are going to take one look at this sparsely appointed staffroom and think: well, yeah. Obviously. Duh. Nothing about this place adds up.

It is, I'll grant, a good venue for an actors' workshop, which is what the film resembles most of all: a chance to get disparate players in the same room and attempt something scuffed-up and semi-improvised, which allows the kids to trash a kitchen and take a passing pop at establishment figure Allam. Again, this isn't a bad idea, but the longer this 97-minute film drags on, the more it seems as though everyone's having to work around a script that has no clear idea whose story this really is. Porter's novel was named for one of the student body's bullied underdogs (sensitively played here by Jay Lycurgo), and while the film takes its title from Murphy's instructor, its tendency to hop and skip around is formalised in Robrecht Heyvaert's hand-held photography, landing arbitrarily on faces and details. (The one visual flourish, a computer-assisted mid-film travelling shot of spectacular pointlessness, has been inserted to zhuzh up a duff, talky staffroom scene that's otherwise going nowhere.) Despite onscreen timechecks, there's no sense of the school day, even less of any rehabilitative infrastructure. Granted, the senior pros - Ullman, Emily Watson in five minutes as a guidance counsellor, a briefly glimpsed Youssef Kerkour; again, the rota system is baffling - can steady certain scenes, and you can see why Murphy, wearing a late-period George Best beard that's a red flag in itself (here's a character with judgement so poor he's let those cheekbones fuzz over), was drawn this way: the role allows him to veer off the rails after several years of deeply internalised work. Even so, his responses as tracked by Mielants here seem unusually non-specific: less those of a teacher driven to despair by the pressures of his working environment than those of a harried producer-star realising the script he's dealing with is tissue paper coming apart in his hands. Netflix doubtless leapt aboard anticipating some serendipitous algorithmic midpoint between Oppenheimer and the platform's big 2025 hit Adolescence. But Steve has been rushed and gabbled; it has the air of a miniseries that's been unsuccessfully compressed, a formatting failure transmitted by mistake. There may well be a lesson in here for the British film industry: stop letting novelists adapt their own work, however much clout they have. The rest merits a D at best, and I don't think I've ever felt a stronger urge to end a review with the words 'see me'.

Steve is now playing in selected cinemas, and streams on Netflix from October 3.