Producer and star Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants recently collaborated on an exceptional adaptation of Claire Keegan's "Small Things Like These," and their new project together is completely different: a drama infused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, with touches of bizarre, dark humor. Max Porter adapted his 2023 short story, "Shy," for the big screen, and Murphy himself gives one of his most uninhibited and effusive performances.
Murphy plays Steve, a stressed-out, troubled, but passionately committed headmaster with a secret alcohol and substance abuse problem, in charge of a residential reform school for delinquent teenagers in the mid-90s. With his team—the headmaster's assistant (Tracey Ullman), the therapist-counselor (Emily Watson), and a new teacher (Little Simz)—he must somehow maintain order in the constant chaos of bickering and maybe even teach them something.
Director: Tim Mielants
Writer: Max Porter
Stars: Cillian Murphy, Tracey Ullman, Jay Lycurgo
The boys are an intimidating mix of energy and brutally aggressive wit, locked in a constant rap battle, but without rapping and with real violence. The quietest and most intelligent is Shy (Jay Lycurgo), and the change of title from book to film is an interesting shift in emphasis, or possibly a more direct way of bringing teacher and student closer together.
One terrible day, a local TV news crew arrives to record a social media segment on 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 will be sold and the school itself will be closed without consulting the staff. Parallel to this calamity, Shy receives a call from his mother and stepfather, telling him they want nothing more to do with him.
The pain of rejection runs through him from head to toe. And the film shows the terrible pathos of Steve's situation. Over a long career of having to be patient with aggressive kids, be tolerant, joke around, not be too harsh, walk the line between friendship and authority, he has bonded with them; Steve has become the most difficult resident of all. The staff itself, however loving and genuinely respectful of all he's accomplished, is wary and concerned about him as they would be with any of the kids. His problems with alcohol and drugs are an open secret. And when the head of the board tells him the school is finished, Steve explodes with rage and threatens to strangle him: a macabre imitation of the kind of outburst they're trying to keep the kids away from.
Meanwhile, the news crew has scheduled on-camera interviews with all the kids in the school, and Steve's intervention, with which the film opens, is so traumatized and so clearly an interview with someone deeply disturbed that at first you might think it's a psychoanalytic interview or a police procedural, or perhaps a true-crime documentary. As for the boys, they seem to rejoice at any hint of fame. When asked what advice he would give his six-year-younger self, one replies, "Always carry a switchblade."
Shy finally gives us a sequence of hope and even redemption, a moment in which the volume is lowered, with an emotional voiceover from Steve himself speaking about the boys; it's a genuinely nice moment, though it perhaps softens the blow and dilutes the ferocity a bit. Murphy and Lycurgo lead an exceptional cast.
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