Review: Urchin

Director:  Harris Dickinson

Stars:  Frank Dillane, Megan Northam, Okezie Morro

With an acting resumé that’s already intimidating – notching up notable work for the likes of Eliza Hittman, Halina Reijn and Ruben Östlund – there was little doubting the talents of 29 year-old Harris Dickinson. Not content with his credible successes so far, Dickinson switches position and takes up residency behind the camera for his feature directing debut Urchin, a mostly ego-free probe into the cyclical traps of addiction for Mike (Frank Dillane), a homeless Londoner whom we meet somewhere near the bottom of one of these loops.

The film opens with a street preacher who sounds uncannily like the kind of religious prognosticator one might find sampled on the intro to a Godspeed You! Black Emperor track. Urchin moves a little like one of the Canadian post-rock band’s monolithic pieces, beginning in anguish before settling, meandering and then slowly working itself back up into full blown agitation. Mike has no time for theological rhetoric. On meeting him his concerns are more practical and immediate, as we watch him prowling the streets in search of his double throughout the film, fellow addict Nathan (Dickinson).

A public scuffle between the two turns into something else when Mike preys on the charity of Ozekie Morro’s trusting passer-by, Simon. A swift assault and theft later and Mike finds himself incarcerated for a period of eight months. We pick up with him on release, now sober, and making an earnest if disorganised effort to follow the rules of the system. His case officer Nadia (Buckso Dhillon-Woolley) has him housed in a temporary hostel, while Amr Waked’s sympathetic hotelier is willing to chance him as a kitchen hand.

As intimated there is a narrative thrust to proceedings, but it evolves at the cadance of the happenstance misadventures that befall Mike as he tries to avoid falling through society’s cracks. While keen to make observations about how British governments routinely fail the poorest and most vulnerable in society, Dickinson’s ambitions here are mercifully removed from the soapboxing belligerence of Ken Loach. Mike’s addictive personality is a pertinent element in the mix. Urchin is not intended to be representative of all homeless people. It’s a specific creation and study. Fortunately for Dickinson, Frank Dillane is more than up to the task of sustaining our attention, if not our unwavering support. 

Mike’s past as an adopted child – now estranged from his former parents – is only vaguely hinted at, allowing the audience to draw conclusions, including the possible significance of a mysterious older woman who peppers the picture and proves a potential catalyst for Mike’s sudden spasm of opportunistic violence. Whenever high or drunk, Mike is a ball of kinetic energy. Sober he ranges from shy to smirking. There’s still the bound-up potential in him for some outburst or faux pas that’ll nosedive his chances in any given scene. Mostly you want to root for him, but he makes it hard work.

Credit to Dickinson for not letting him off the hook. Late in the picture, having backslid in ways that will frustrate some audiences, Mike gets a terse telling-off from burgeoning love interest Andrea (Megan Northam), and everything she says holds water. But, by this stage in the cycle, we can wearily predict Mike’s response and reaction, even if his own impulses largely seem a mystery to him. There’s good reason to suspect that he’s in need of more attentive care, but the throttled system has no scope, capacity or interest in improving his mental health. Mike listens to meditation tapes in the room of his hostel, and gives them a serious chance, but his initial tentativeness belays their true nature; a band-aid on a much deeper wound.

Dickinson clearly has ambitions beyond a bog-standard social drama, and while efforts to represent some kind of abstract interiority to Mike are commendable in principle, the results aren’t particularly original or conclusive. That we end in one of these liminal spaces feels fairly disappointing. Something elliptical that sort of reads as noncommittal. Skipping Mike’s prison sentence and how he achieves sobriety also makes it feel as though a vital part of the puzzle has been removed for us. It’s easy to appreciate why – time, practicality, etc – but it still feels like a significant gap in the journey, one that feels more crucial once the picture’s allowed some time to settle.

For the most part, though, this is a noteworthy opening salvo from Dickinson the director, and a worthy career-maker for Dillane, who ought to find himself higher up the casting call sheets as a result. Urchin doesn’t have to preach it’s case; the ills that cage characters like Mike are self-evident. Instead Dickinson simply tries to understand the itchy impulses of a man most of us would avoid making eye-contact with. There are a lot of assumptions here, but Dickinson and Dillane make most of them compelling.