Harris Dickinson (2025)

Successful young film actors notoriously often say, ‘But what I really want to do is direct’.  One of Britain’s best, still not yet thirty, Harris Dickinson has been shining on screen for the best of a part of a decade.  I don’t know if he has said he’d rather direct; if he has, he’s now turned word into deed with Urchin.  You certainly don’t want Dickinson to disappear – it’s a bonus that he plays a supporting role in his debut feature – but Urchin, which he also wrote, certainly whets your appetite for more from him behind the camera.

Dickinson’s title character is Mike (Frank Dillane), a thirtyish homeless man in present-day London.  At the start of the film, drug-dependent Mike, begging on the street, gets cash from an elderly couple then has it nicked by fellow addict Nathan (Dickinson).  The pair scrap outside the UCL East building in Marshgate; Simon (Okezie Morro), a well-dressed, well-meaning passer-by, intervenes and, once Nathan has departed the scene, offers to buy Mike a sandwich.  In return, Mike violently assaults Simon, steals his watch and tries to pawn it, before being arrested.  He serves half of a fourteen-month jail sentence.  On release, he’s interviewed by a probation officer (Buckso Dhillon Woodley), who arranges hostel accommodation.  She also reminds Mike that she knows he knows ‘how it works’.  He has, in other words, been through this process before.  Urchin basically describes one revolution of the vicious cycle of Mike’s existence, but Dickinson is intent on elevating the film above slice-of-life realism.  By the closing stages, Mike is back to drugs, debt and crime.  In Urchin‘s phantasmagoric finale, he literally spirals down, falling through darkness until he seems to reach the bottom of the pit.  There he curls into a foetal position and is consumed in void.

Dickinson doesn’t dwell on the miseries of Mike’s time in prison or do the obvious thing of having his grim story play out under grey skies and lashing rain.  Drab urban settings are hardly in short supply but nor are they the whole show.  Cinematographer Josée Deshaies takes every opportunity to highlight bright colour – an orange jacket of Mike’s, the blue bibs worn by him and his co-workers, whose job is picking up litter in Potters Field Park, near Tower Bridge.  Dickinson gets a vivid, fluent lead performance from Frank Dillane (Stephen’s son, Richard’s nephew), orchestrates the naturalistic playing of the supporting cast, and demonstrates a talent for finessing details in ways that heighten their impact without violating the prevailing realism.  At a pre-interview for a restorative justice session with Simon, Mike meets Scott (Michael Colgan), who’ll mediate the session, and complains about his breathy voice, which Mike thinks phony and patronising.  He says this without undue aggression, but his words hit home:  the unfortunate Scott doesn’t know what to say next or, especially, how to say it.  Near the end of the film, Mike reconnects with Nathan, now in work and living with an older woman (Lacey Bond).  His domestic duties include feeding her pet snake.  An image of the snake gobbling a mouse is startling but comical, too.

Dillane conveys strongly, almost wordlessly, Mike’s loneliness; at the same time, Urchin includes touching moments of connection between him and some of those he meets.  Franco (Amr Waked), who runs the busy kitchen of a ropy hotel, takes him on as an apprentice chef.  One evening, Mike accompanies two other kitchen staff (Karyna Khymchuk and Shonagh Marie) to a karaoke session in a local bar.  It’s not long before Mike’s unreliable moods and timekeeping lose him the kitchen job; the litter collecting follows, and he gets friendly with a French colleague, Andrea (Megan Northam); they sleep together before falling out and parting company.  Mike and Andrea spend an alfresco evening with an older pair of outsiders, a man and a woman.  This culminates in nighttime dancing to Desireless’s ‘Voyage, voyage’; like the karaoke interlude, where Mike and the others sing along to Atomic Kitten’s ‘Whole Again’, the dance is heartening, with tantalising hints of the possibility of enjoyable social life.  It’s a high point, too, in the sense that things go downhill for Mike from this evening onwards:  the older man tempts him into taking ketamine.  Dillane and Dickinson show wholehearted sympathy with Mike but don’t stint on showing how unreasonable he can be.  He feels consistently thwarted by others, including authority figures (that’s how Mike sees them anyway).  Dickinson treats the latter more fairly than Ken Loach has usually done.  Rather than proxies for a heartless establishment, these are people trying to do unenviable jobs as decently as they can.

I was less keen on Urchin‘s more calculatedly aesthetic side.  This is heralded by the first appearance of an old woman (Holly de Jong), playing a violin in the street, but with Mike an audience of one.  The woman pops up again as a busker and near the end of the film, just before Mike’s final descent, as a kind of votary; by now, Dickinson’s Nathan has also transmogrified into a robed, quasi-sacerdotal figure.  These elements – along with foreshadowing of Mike’s descent to darkness in close-ups of water swirling down the plughole of the shower in his hostel room – could be seen as a copout on Dickinson’s part, an admission that he can’t, if he sticks with realism, bring the film to anything but a predictable downbeat conclusion.  That may be partly true, yet you sense something more positive in the determination to avoid ending Urchin with the protagonist back in jail.  This first-time director is keen to go beyond social realism, even if he doesn’t on this occasion find a satisfying way of doing so.  And the weird religious imagery of the closing scenes does serve a kind of bookending purpose, with its echo of the film’s opening sequence, where Mike’s disturbed from sleep in cardboard city by the loud voice of a street preacher (Claudia Jones) proclaiming Jesus’ love.  Urchin premiered (alongside Harry Lighton’s Pillion) in this year’s Un Certain Regard at Cannes.  Frank Dillane won the section’s Best Actor award and Harris Dickinson the Festival’s FIPRESCI Prize.  Both well deserved.

21 October 2025