Producer-star Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants last collaborated on a superlative adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, and their new project together could hardly be more different: a drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour. Max Porter has adapted his own 2023 novella Shy for the screen and Murphy himself gives one of his most uninhibited and demonstrative performances.
Murphy is Steve, a stressed, troubled but passionately committed headteacher with a secret alcohol and substance abuse problem, in charge of a residential reform school for delinquent teenage boys some time in the mid-90s. With his staff – deputy (Tracey Ullman), therapist-counsellor (Emily Watson) and a new teacher (Little Simz) – he has to somehow keep order in the permanent bedlam of fights and maybe even teach them something.
The boys themselves are an intimidating mix of energy and brutally aggressive wit, engaged in a permanent rap battle, but without the rap and with actual violence. The quietest and smartest is Shy (Jay Lycurgo), and the change of title from book to film is an interesting shift in emphasis, or conceivably a more pointed way of bringing teacher and pupil into closer parallel.
On one terrible day, a local TV news crew arrives to film a social-interest segment about the school, coinciding with a visit from the pompous local MP (Roger Allam); they set up the cameras just after Steve receives news from the hospital trust that the school buildings are to be sold and the school itself abolished without any consultation with staff. In parallel with this calamity, Shy gets a call from his mother and stepfather, saying that they wish to have nothing more to do with him.
The pain of rejection goes from top to bottom. And the film shows the awful pathos of Steve’s position. Over a long career of having to be patient with truculent boys, having to be tolerant, having to joke around, not coming down too hard, walking the line between friendship and authority, he has effectively joined them; Steve has become the most difficult resident of all. The staff themselves, however affectionate and genuinely respectful of all that he has achieved, are wary and concerned about him as they would be with one of the boys. His drink and substance abuse problems are an open secret. And when the trust chair tells him that the school is finished, Steve erupts with rage and threatens to strangle him – a macabre imitation of just the kind of outburst that they are trying to get the boys to move away from.
The news crew have, meanwhile, set up on-camera interviews with everyone at the school and Steve’s contribution, which begins the film, is so traumatised, and so clearly an interview with someone deeply upset, that you might think at first that this is a psychoanalyst or police procedural interview, or maybe a true-crime documentary. As for the boys themselves, they seem cheerfully energised by any hint of celebrity. On being asked what advice he would give his six-years younger self, one says: “Always carry a blade.”
Shy finally gives us a sequence of hope and even redemption, a moment where the amp is turned down from 11, with an emotional voiceover from Steve himself about the boys; it is a really sympathetic moment, although it perhaps softens the blow and dilutes the ferocity a bit. Murphy and Lycurgo lead an outstanding cast.
• Steve screened at the Toronto film festival. It is in cinemas from 19 September, and on Netflix from 3 October.
