Steve: What It Means To Be A Mentor

Calder Wysong ’27

What transforms an educator into a mentor? Director Tim Mielants’ 2025 film Steve raises that question perfectly. Starring Cilian Murphy, who had been cast in Mielants’ 2024 film Small Things Like These, the film is both a jarring reminder of the inability we sometimes have to help those around us when we’re up against the wall and a demonstration of how we can help others when given the opportunity. The film is an adaptation of the Max Porter book Shy. Although the two follow the same plot, Mielants is pioneering in the vision he pursues. Set in the mid-nineties in England over one singular day at a last-chance reform school for troubled youth, Mielants shifts the book’s perspective from one of the boys at the school, Shy, to the teacher’s perspective. Cilian’s performance is, as in Mielants’ 2024 film, brilliant. Interestingly, he plays similar characters in both–family men haunted by the guilty reminder of what they can’t control. In Steve, by taking the role of the titular character, that’s put on full display. The film is a constant reminder of Steve’s shortcomings–his inability to prevent the closing of the school, to mitigate the danger that the boys pose to one another and themselves, and to preserve the friendships he’s cultivated with them. The responsibility that rests on his shoulders is unbearable, and Cilian’s performance greatly emphasizes this. In spite of Steve’s family only being introduced briefly at the film’s conclusion, the film hammers home his commitment to them, and how his education is an attempt to foster the young men that live at the school.

As mentioned, the film’s entire course is over a single day. When he’s not teaching his students, or trying to keep them from attacking each other in the presence of a film crew documenting the school, Cilian’s character is quietly lamenting over his inability to manage the tasks around him. The school’s funding is being cut by the government, and although it’s brief, Cilian’s incredulous rage at the news is incredibly unsettling in the middle of his performance as such a quiet character. The film itself couldn’t be labeled as entirely quiet, as evidenced by the extended drone shot accompanied with the jungle/drum-and-bass that Shy is always listening to on his Walkman. Shy himself, as a character, is the most isolated of the boys at the school, and much of that isolation is a key plot point for the film. His mother and stepdad have made the decision to disown him, effectively leaving him abandoned at the school. With no one to turn to, and already spiraling mentally due to how the other boys treat him, Shy initiates a plan to take his own life by drowning himself in the nearby pond, another pivotal plot point that the film covers. Jay Lycurgo, who plays Shy, also gives a profound performance in spite of having lost the role of the protagonist that was more promised to his character in Porter’s book. Really, the greatest dynamic exists between Steve and Shy–the quiet teacher who’s holding on by a thread and his student in the same position. Steve’s discovery of Shy’s mental health struggles, the consequences of them, and what allows the two of them to overcome those odds. It’s a film very representative of how mental health should be handled in the education system. It doesn’t necessarily require the support of an instructor in the way Steve provides for Shy, but it’s a call for intervention in this serious crisis–especially for youth. And, really, there should be no reason to shy away from it.

Steve is currently streaming on Netflix.