‘Steve’ Ending Explained – Haunting Ambiguity Is A Powerful Choice

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS

You’re not supposed to quite know what to make of the ending of Steve, particularly its final frames depicting the titular headteacher climbing a ladder to his home attic with a bottle of booze clutched in his hand. The haunting drama knows what you’re thinking, and that’s enough. After seeing how close Shy came to ending his own life, the point about how we can never truly know what someone is going through is well made. We must entertain the possibility that Steve had reached his own end, right after helping to prevent Shy’s.

But we’ll get to that, since the final scenes don’t happen in isolation – they’re outgrowths of the careful dramatic build-up threaded all throughout the movie, which finds Steve’s flailing reform college, Stanton Wood, on the cusp of closure, its volatile students and staff experiencing one particularly difficult day in their shared lives. Steve’s story powerfully intersects with that of Shy, an inscrutable student with a history of violence whose depressive spiral begins with a callous phone call from his mother and almost ends in a lake with a backpack full of rocks. Only Steve can save Shy, perhaps without even realising it, but the one person Steve might not be able to rescue is himself.

Stanton Wood Will Be Closing

One thing that Steve deliberately leaves unaddressed is the inevitable fate of Stanton Wood, a fictional reform college operating out of the skeleton of a private manor. The school, designed to house and tutor troubled young men at the taxpayer’s expense, has been sold off from beneath the staff and students and will close down in six months. This fact is a huge contributing factor in Steve’s downward spiral as he turns to substance misuse in an effort to get through the day.

The students don’t know about what’s happening to Stanton Wood, and we, the audience, have no idea whether it closes after the movie ends. But the clear implication is that it will. Just as it’s presented to Steve, the closure is inevitable. Conservative slashes to social welfare schemes designed to ease the taxpayer’s burden and line the pockets of private enterprise mean that the school in its current form is a boondoggle. The students are surplus to requirements.

Shy’s Salvation

Shy is a sweet, interesting, complicated kid. He loves drum and bass and never removes the Walkman that floods his reality with the stuff; it’s his wall against incursion, his lullaby, his safe space. But he’s also reactively violent, confused about his identity, and intensely regretful of his choices and his nature. When the film crew on campus to shoot a short human interest story ask him to summarize himself in three words, he goes with, “Depressed, angry, and bored.”

Later, that same film crew pokes around in his room and finds his collection of rocks, all contained within a rucksack. They laugh at the absurdity of the find without ever considering its implications, but the audience can’t hide behind obliviousness in the same way. Whatever his initial reason for collecting the rocks might have been – it’s clarified he has an interest in geology – it becomes clear once we see him standing ominously in front of a lake on the grounds what he intends to use them for.

Shy’s depressive spiral is triggered by a phone call from his mother, explaining that she and his stepfather are ceasing contact with him. At his lowest ebb, he straps on his rucksack and walks out into the water, step by step, slowly submerging. But in the end, Shy doesn’t take his own life. Instead, he returns to shore and starts pitching his rocks through Stanton Wood’s windows, waking all the other students who rush to pile on him. Steve, who could perhaps have found Shy earlier if he weren’t too exhausted and strung out to have done so, holds him reassuringly, like a son.

The Symbology Of Durdle Door

Several times throughout Steve, Shy becomes engrossed by an image of Durdle Door, a natural limestone arch on the Jurassic Coast in south Dorset. The final scenes of the movie venture through the photo to the landmark itself, as the waves quietly lap the pebble shore. But why is this of any significance to Shy?

Two reasons, or maybe two and a half. Shy’s passion for geology, expressed through his rock collection, would naturally lead him to be curious about Durdle Door. The landmark might have also represented the idea of escape, the promise that one day he would be freed from the confines of Stanton Wood.

But the likeliest answer is that Durdle Door is a monument to resilience, a natural structure so besieged by waves that a hole had been bored through the middle of it. And yet it remained standing all the same.

Steve’s Trip to the Attic

The ending of Steve is the first time we consider that the eponymous headteacher has a life of his own outside the school. But in the final scenes, we see him returning home, still covered in mud, to greet his wife and daughters as they’re leaving for school. His demeanour is completely different from the frayed man who rattled through the halls of Stanton Wood, swigging liquor and oxycodone from hidden bottles. As Amanda said, he keeps his pain bottled up and puts on a front to the world.

As soon as Steve’s family leaves the house, he visibly sags. He doesn’t wash and go to bed as advised. Instead, he picks up another bottle and climbs the ladder to the attic, for reasons unknown. We can only speculate what he might be doing up there – drinking himself into oblivion, or perhaps something more tragic and final, in a space where his children returning from school won’t find him.

It’s a deeply sad parting thought either way, but a poignant reminder of how we can never truly understand what someone else might be going through.