Review: Urchin (2025, dir. Harris Dickinson)

There’s a trickiness to navigating the portrayal of someone who exists on the fringes of society. In Urchin, the feature directorial debut of actor Harris Dickinson, we first see homeless drug addict Mike (Frank Dillane) wandering around London asking people for money with little to no success. When someone does finally offer Mike some help, taking him to a nearby restaurant to buy him a meal, Mike sucker punches them, stealing their watch so he can pawn it for some quick cash. It’s a setup that establishes Dickinson as a filmmaker up for a challenge, choosing to open on his protagonist at rock bottom before building sympathy for him as he attempts to climb out of a spiral he’s fallen into many times before.

Dickinson’s efforts to navigate that journey are uneven at best, a combination of good and bad instincts that make for a flawed but promising first feature. The police arrest Mike shortly after the assault, having caught the entire incident on security cameras, and throw him in jail for eight months. The film then skips ahead to Mike finishing his sentence, giving him the chance to reset himself after serving time, with a social worker providing him temporary housing at a hostel and a job as a hotel cook.

These moments between Mike and the systems meant to reintegrate him into society show Dickinson approach his subject matter from the right place, juxtaposing the dehumanizing process of a one size fits all approach to rehabilitation against the basic human decency Mike deserves. When he asks about what happens once his housing arrangement ends he’s told not to worry about it just yet, a dismissal that exposes how this system views Mike and others like him as cases to be shuffled along a workflow.

Urchin works best when it stays in the realm of drawing direct lines between Mike and the social and political powers he’s at the mercy of. The tendency of narratives about the lower class to look through an individualist lens, where the focus stays on how characters try to overcome barriers rather than interrogating what those barriers are and how they got there, only reinforces the failings of institutions many storytellers gladly mine. Context is key, and some of the filmmakers influencing Dickinson’s film - Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, and the Dardennes - understand how to apply that context so it informs every element of their stories.

As Urchin continues, Dickinson shows a disappointing preference for character over context. With cinematographer Josée Deshaies, he hops back and forth between observational and stylized sequences, including several that provide surreal and enigmatic glimpses into Mike’s perspective. The more stylized sequences, which include needle drops of songs by the likes of Atomic Kitten and Desireless, call more attention to themselves as showy bits of directorial flair instead of adding anything substantive to the film or Mike’s character.

The observational parts work better, giving Dillane the opportunity to show Mike’s emotional highs and lows as he struggles to support himself, although the showy instincts from the stylized scenes creep in and clash. An early scene observes Mike getting into a public fight with a friend (played by Dickinson) from afar, shot with multiple cameras from a distance that appears to include non-actors who weren’t aware of being filmed. It makes for a disarming blend of fiction and non-fiction, but it’s difficult to parse out the intention outside of some hidden camera stunt filmmaking.

While there are sincere motives behind Dickinson’s direction that makes Urchin worth consideration, the bumpy blend of styles makes his execution unfocused. As the social worker and government support drop out of the film, leaving Mike to his own despair and setting him up to fail, Dickinson goes further inward, with more fantasy sequences that imply Mike’s loosening grip on reality. Heavy on recurring images and symbols, these scenes are designed to be interpreted however one sees fit to parse out his interiority. And if the intent of establishing more to Mike outside of the confines of this narrative sounds fine in theory, in practice it’s more like dropping breadcrumbs to solve the mystery of his mind. In a medium that rarely portrays the underprivileged with rich, interior lives, it’s hard to see the point of this enigmatic dress up.

Urchin is now in theatres in Canada via Films We Like and the US via 1-2 Special. You can find Canadian showtimes for Urchin here and US showtimes here.