Steal Review: A Breathless Financial Thriller with Sharp Social Commentary
The glossy new six-part thriller Steal on Prime Video kicks into high gear from its opening moments and rarely lets up, delivering a hugely entertaining ride through the world of high-stakes finance and criminal deception. At its heart is Sophie Turner, continuing to deliver sterling work post-Game of Thrones, as Zara Dunne, a pension management company employee who becomes embroiled in a meticulously planned £4 billion heist.
A Heist with Unexpected Depth
The series opens with Zara showing new underling Myrtle around the trades processing floor, offering practical advice about workplace survival. This mundane setting is violently disrupted when a team of armed villains swarms the floor. The criminals, sporting sophisticated prosthetics designed to fool facial recognition software, herd the staff into conference rooms while executing their audacious plan.
What follows is a brilliantly suspenseful opening hour that establishes the show's distinctive tone. The bad guys are portrayed as nimble, intelligent, and quietly vicious, with the financial manipulation larded with just enough violence to maintain tension without becoming repulsive. When colleague Luke crumbles under pressure, Zara must step in to save the day, emerging as an unlikely hero once the thieves complete their hi-tech heist and depart.
Sophie Turner's Compelling Performance
Turner delivers a finely calibrated performance that keeps Zara credible throughout the series' twists and turns. She portrays her not as a superhero but as a cornered terrier, with survival instincts rooted in a difficult upbringing with her alcoholic, volatile mother Haley. The emotionally brutal scenes between Turner and Anastasia Hille as Haley are so compelling that they could sustain a purely domestic drama on their own.
As the police investigation begins under DCI Rhys Kovac, played with intriguing complexity by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, the story expands into a wild ride through layers of deceit and shifting alliances. The narrative takes viewers on a journey through varying degrees of necessary preposterousness before delivering a satisfying conclusion that leaves audiences both breathless and thoroughly entertained.
More Than Just Thrills
Amid all the action and suspense, Steal finds room for thoughtful social commentary. While never taking its foot off the narrative accelerator, the series becomes a meditation on the notion that the love of money is the root of all evil. The world of finance is depicted as fundamentally dependent on gambling—gambling conducted by a tiny number of people using other people's money while being disproportionately rewarded for their risk-taking.
The show highlights the stark inequality within financial institutions, contrasting the management committee's £1 million annual salaries plus guaranteed bonuses with the modest earnings of employees like Zara and Luke. Steal suggests that such resentment inevitably builds within companies and, when multiplied across society, contributes to the dangerous concentration of wealth generated by many into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.
A Promising Debut
This marks the debut screenplay of writer Sotiris Nikias, who honed his craft writing crime novels under the pen name Ray Celestin. His experience shows in the tightly plotted narrative and well-developed characters that populate this engaging thriller. While the financial systems depicted may be arcane and the players focused solely on wealth extraction, the human drama at the story's core remains accessible and compelling.
Steal ultimately succeeds as both an adrenaline-fueled heist drama and a clever commentary on contemporary economic inequalities. As viewers root for Zara to navigate the dangerous waters of financial crime and personal survival, they're also invited to consider broader questions about wealth distribution and systemic fairness in modern capitalism.
