“Not only a moving film but an essential one for the rights of differently abled people.”

“I hate myself sometimes,” says Shy, one of the main characters. The words landed like a hard blow. But it was another phrase, “society’s waste product,” that reverberated in my head after leaving Tim Mielants’ Steve. Adapted from Max Porter’s novella Shy (with Porter also writing the screenplay), Steve follows a single day in 1996 at Stanton Wood, a boarding school for “troubled boys.” But that label itself carries violence: boys with different neurotypes, or boys suffering from trauma, reduced to a phrase that marks them as less than human.

Hearing those words, “society’s waste product,” was stabbing, devastating, and completely honest. All my life I have heard language that makes me feel less like a person and more like a parasite, a mistake, something broken. Steve captures that pain with piercing accuracy. It is not a comfortable film, but it is truthful, and for that reason alone it stands as a powerful attestation, a necessary picture that shows the world how neurodivergent and traumatized individuals are too often treated.

The structure of Steve is complex, as it opens with a documentary crew taking footage while telling two separate stories about the characters of Steve and Shy. The documentary crew visits Stanton Wood to record the lives of the students and teachers, with the stated goal of showing how extra support is needed for these young men. But Mielants and Porter make clear it is not that the boys are broken, nor that they inherently need “extra” help. Rather, society itself is structured against them, against their neurotypes, and against their histories of trauma. What looks like failure is often just the weight of systemic hurdles that most people never face.

At the center of the film is Steve himself, the head teacher and de facto leader of Stanton Wood, played with extraordinary force by Cillian Murphy. He gives one of the year’s most tremendous performances, not through grand speeches but through his eyes, his silences, and his ability to radiate care, frustration, and fear in equal measure. He is a figure of authority but also ambiguity as his own neurodivergence is suggested in subtle ways, and Murphy inhabits that complexity with remarkable sensitivity. In his hands, Murphy allows Steve to become both a protector and a mirror, someone who sees the boys not as burdens but as “extraordinarily complex individuals,” as he tells the documentary crew. The line rings true not only because of the writing, but because Murphy makes it so, refusing condescension or sentimentality.

If Murphy is the anchor, Jay Lycurgo is the soul. As Shy, Lycurgo delivers a raw and emotional performance of remarkable authenticity. Lycurgo digs into the core of Shy’s self-hatred, longing, and fleeting joy, creating a character who feels lived-in, complex, and true. When he says, “I hate myself sometimes,” it is not a line of dialogue but a reverberation of the truth that has lived in his mind for a long time. Later, when he admits, “Sometimes I want to be four years old and not fuck up,” the devastation is unbearable in its honesty. Lycurgo makes us feel not only Shy’s pain but his humanity and his capacity for love.

Emily Watson appears briefly as a psychiatrist and her performance, though small, is sharp and unsettling. On the surface she is well-meaning, but beneath the surface there is ignorance and even contempt. In just a few minutes she embodies the failures of so many in medical positions of power, of those who cloak their misunderstanding in medical language, and who think themselves benevolent while reinforcing stigma. It’s due to her chameleon-like performance that the film reveals how systemic misperception can wound as deeply as cruelty and create years of stigmatization and pain.

What makes Steve so powerful is not only its performances but the writing. Max Porter’s screenplay has no malice toward its characters. He writes Shy and the boys without stereotype, without pity, without falsity. The dialogue has rhythm, pain, and humor, but never mockery or contempt. Every beat feels like a lived experience. It is rare to see neurodivergent characters written with such depth and respect, and it is even rarer to see them presented as simply human, without caricature.

For a long time, I thought representation in cinema wasn’t very important. Maybe that was because I never thought I would see a character remotely like myself on screen, or because I wasn’t ready to admit how much it mattered. But things have changed. As an autistic person, I know how much misrepresentation has cost us and how often films reduce us to savants, burdens, and jokes. For decades, neurotypical filmmakers have offered lazy, misinformed depictions that distort who we are. But here, in Steve, I saw something different. Porter and Mielants (himself dyslexic, with a personal connection to this material) refuse the usual stereotypes. They present the characters not as “others” but as themselves.

Watching Shy, I thought of my own past. Of growing up afraid to tell others who I am. Of hearing that autism was fake, or a disease, or the byproduct of vaccines. Of being told, over and over, that I was defective and lesser. And I thought, too, of the cruelty of the present moment, in which neurodivergent and autistic people are attacked daily by politicians, pundits, and cultural currents that would prefer we not exist at all while completely misrepresenting our truths to fit their narratives. Against this, a film like Steve matters. Its honesty, its love, and its refusal to condescend give power.

Tim Mielants has crafted not only a moving film but an essential one for the rights of differently abled people. Steve is a testament to lives too often dismissed, a reminder that those called “waste products” are in fact extraordinary, complex, and deeply human. Above all, it is a film that insists on seeing people fully, and for that reason, it deserves to be cherished