Everyone’s Broken (and Still Beautiful) 2025

Steve (2025) isn’t a film about superheroes or saviors. It’s about survival — emotional, ethical, spiritual. Set in the ruins of 1990s Britain, where politics failed the people and the system failed its youth, Tim Mielants’ adaptation of Max Porter’s Shy is both brutal and tender. At its heart lies one truth: everyone is broken, and yet, somehow, the world remains beautiful.

I. A School of Ghosts

There’s a heaviness to Steve (2025) that lingers long after the credits fade. The film feels like a storm that refuses to pass — damp corridors, splintered desks, boys with wild eyes and soft hearts. The story unfolds over twenty-four hours in a school that’s less an institution and more a pressure cooker of failed hope.

Cillian Murphy plays Steve, a headteacher who moves like a man stitched together by guilt and duty. His body hurts — the result of a car accident — and his soul aches from years of holding together something destined to collapse. The boys are violent, brilliant, desperate. The teachers are tired, bleeding patience. The system, as always, looks away.

Britain in 1996 is cracked at the seams. Thatcherism’s hangover still throbs in every underfunded institution, every headline that blames the poor for being poor. Into this comes Shy (Jay Lycurgo), a boy trembling between anger and abandonment. His mother’s last phone call echoes through the film like a prayer swallowed by static.

And amid all that wreckage — the film dares to be beautiful.

II. The Weight of the Broken

Max Porter’s novella Shy was already fragmented — a fever dream of prose stitched with poetry. Tim Mielants keeps that structure alive on screen, giving us a story told in shards: scenes cut abruptly, emotions erupt mid-sentence, and the sound design collapses and swells like breath through grief.

But the film’s true power isn’t in its experimental form. It’s in its humanity.

Steve isn’t a hero. He’s a man at the edge of collapse. Addicted to painkillers, haunted by the accident that crippled him, he tries to hold the world steady for boys who’ve never known stability. Each student mirrors a fracture in him — fear, rage, loss, hope.

And Tracey Ullman’s Amanda, the deputy head, cuts through the chaos with brutal tenderness. Her line — “I fucking love them” — is the film’s heartbeat. It’s what keeps the story from drowning in despair. Because love, here, isn’t gentle. It’s work. It’s resistance. It’s showing up every day for people who bite, scream, and cry — because someone has to.

III. The Intruders

Halfway through the film, a TV crew arrives to document the school’s “progress.”

Their presence fractures the fragile world further.

The camera, once intimate, becomes invasive. The boys, once human, become spectacle.

The crew asks shallow questions, hungry for soundbites: “What’s wrong with these kids?” “Who’s to blame?”

In that moment, Steve becomes a meta-commentary on storytelling itself. Who gets to tell the story of the broken? Who decides what is beautiful, what is tragic, what is worth saving?

We watch as the film’s own narrative is violated — fragmented by the intrusion of outsiders who seek simplicity where only complexity exists. The TV crew’s footage turns suffering into content. But Mielants’ camera refuses that. He holds still. He listens. He gives silence space to breathe.

In those silences, you can almost hear the pulse of the real world — the quiet truth of overlooked lives.

IV. Fragments of Grace

For all its darkness, Steve (2025) glows with moments of grace so fragile you barely dare to look at them.

A boy helping another with a math problem, both pretending not to care.

Amanda lighting a cigarette and laughing through exhaustion.

Steve sitting in his car, eyes red, hands trembling, whispering, “It’s not enough,” before driving back anyway.

These small mercies make the film bearable. They’re not grand acts of redemption — they’re whispers of persistence.

Because Steve isn’t about saving anyone. It’s about trying.

And in a world where trying feels like rebellion, that’s enough.

V. The Beauty of the Unfixed

Everything in Steve is broken — the education system, the people, the ethics, the narrative itself.

And yet, the film insists on beauty.

It’s in the soft focus of dawn light on shattered glass.

In the trembling voice of a teacher saying “good morning” one more time.

In Murphy’s eyes, where every emotion — guilt, love, terror, mercy — collides like storm clouds.

There are no answers. No healing arc. No happy ending.

The story ends the way life often does — abruptly, uncertainly, mid-repair.

But that’s the point. Steve (2025) doesn’t pretend to fix anything because real life doesn’t either. What it offers instead is presence — an invitation to witness, to feel, to sit inside someone else’s chaos and not look away.

That is its grace. That is its rebellion.

VI. The Face of Compassion

Cillian Murphy delivers one of the most quietly devastating performances of his career.

His acting is less about movement and more about micro-expression — the small flicker of regret before a decision, the soft collapse of his shoulders after a loss.

In many ways, Steve is not a teacher but a symbol — of every person trying to build something kind in a system designed to break it. His compassion costs him everything, but it’s also what keeps him human.

Amanda, meanwhile, embodies the heart of the film’s thesis: love is messy, profane, and necessary.

Her profanity isn’t crudeness; it’s conviction. She loves the boys not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard to love — and that’s what makes it real.

VII. Broken, but Still Here

When the credits roll, you sit in silence — not because you’re satisfied, but because you’re seen.

Steve (2025) reminds us that art doesn’t need to heal us to matter.

Sometimes, it just needs to hold our hand while we fall apart.

The film doesn’t solve anything — not grief, not addiction, not systemic cruelty.

But in every shattered moment, there’s a shimmer of resilience. A reminder that even in ruin, something still hums — quietly, beautifully, insistently alive.

And maybe that’s the point.

The world is broken.

We all are.

But maybe — just maybe — that’s what makes it beautiful.