Steve

There are few actors better able to convey true emotional turmoil than Cillian Murphy. He effortlessly inhabits characters pushed right to the brink, from his portrait of a tortured scientist in Oppenheimer to his apocalypse-survivor in 28 Days Later. It’s no surprise that he excels once again in his second collaboration with director Tim Mielants (after Small Things Like These), a propulsive, rough-hewn but gut-punch-packing adaptation by screenwriter Max Porter of his own novel, Shy.

This time Murphy is tasked with showing the whole spectrum of human emotion over the course of a single day. He makes short work of it, playing the titular character Steve, a warm-hearted but harried headteacher running — pretty much singlehandedly — a state-funded reform school for young men in 1990s Britain. These are boys whom society has turned its back on, who would otherwise likely wind up in young offenders’ facilities. In their ranks is the enigmatic, jungle music obsessive Shy (Jay Lycurgo), able to read everyone — Steve, who secretly struggles with alcoholism, included — and verbally jab them where it hurts. On this particular day, Steve and Shy’s turbulent emotional trajectories mysteriously align.

Its sheer force of emotion makes Steve cinematic dynamite.

These are 24 hours where everything is at risk of falling apart. Timestamped title cards usefully keep the rhythm of the day, while hand-held shots snake through the winding, labyrinthine corridors of the boarding school — arguments erupting, fights breaking out — trying to keep up with all the action. To make Steve’s already frenzied day-to-day worse, an interfering news crew are onsite to have a snoop around. A portentous meeting with the school board is upcoming (the school’s funding already a question mark), along with a visit from a snooty, disconnected MP (Roger Allam). Steve’s tiny cluster of staff, spearheaded by dauntless deputy head Amanda (Tracey Ullman), are clearly semi-delirious, while unaddressed concerns among them dangerously stack up.

That visceral sense of things spiralling out of control is in large part thanks to Robrecht Heyvaert’s disorienting cinematography. There are a couple of moments where his experimental aerial shots go a little overboard, while Porter’s elegant, no-line-wasted screenplay sacrifices some of Shy’s interiority. But there are other moments where its sheer force of emotion — rage, defiance, unalloyed joy — make Steve cinematic dynamite.