A year after his Oscar-winning performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy returns with a strikingly different role in Netflix’s ‘Steve’, which began streaming on October 3. Directed by Tim Mielants and co-produced by Murphy under his new banner Big Things Films, the project adapts Max Porter’s 2019 novella ‘Shy’, reimagined from a fresh perspective.
While Porter’s original story centered on a troubled teenage boy, the film shifts focus to the school’s head teacher, Steve, a compassionate yet exhausted figure trying to hold together an underfunded reform school for boys in the mid-1990s. The setting, marked by institutional decay and emotional turbulence, allows Murphy to explore the quiet heroism and hidden despair of educators fighting for lost causes.
The cast includes Emily Watson, Tracey Ullman, Jay Lycurgo and Simbi Ajikawo, with Roger Allam appearing as a wry Tory minister. The film also reunites Murphy and Watson, who previously worked together on ‘Small Things Like These’, another Mielants-directed adaptation of Porter’s work.
Shot in a single location and in sequence, Steve embraces the naturalistic filmmaking style inspired by British director Ken Loach, with whom Murphy collaborated in ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ (2006). This method, rarely used in mainstream cinema, adds a raw immediacy to the performances, especially in scenes depicting the school’s closure and the emotional disintegration of its staff and students.
In Steve, Murphy embodies a man caught between professional duty and personal collapse, portraying addiction as a quiet, invisible struggle. The film rejects the glamorization of substance abuse, instead depicting it as an everyday affliction that coexists with functionality and responsibility. Murphy’s worn-out look, achieved through a single, carefully designed costume, and an unshaven, sleepless demeanor, deepens the realism of his performance.
The film arrives after Murphy’s global success in ‘Oppenheimer’, yet it marks a continuation of his preference for smaller, character-driven stories. Rather than pursuing big studio projects, the Irish actor has remained focused on introspective narratives that examine resilience and moral ambiguity.
Murphy will next make a brief appearance in ‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’, directed by Nia DaCosta, but Steve represents a creative homecoming, a grounded, human-scale story that contrasts with the grandeur of Oppenheimer.
With Steve, Cillian Murphy trades atomic tension for emotional exhaustion, portraying not the end of the world but the slow unraveling of an ordinary life.
