“Babygirl” star Harris Dickinson is a little too young, a little too handsome, and a little too hot right now for critics to pretend as if his directorial debut exists in a vacuum, and yet the raw and raggedy “Urchin” — which would command our attention regardless of who made it — is only a few seconds old before it’s locked into the thrall of a different actor altogether.
Best known for playing the young Tom Riddle in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” Frank Dillane awakens into this movie with the ache and neediness of an open wound. His character’s name is Mike, he’s been living on the streets of London for the last five years, and he doesn’t take kindly to the street preacher whose shouting (“Have you heard about Jesus!?”) stirs him out of his latest drug stupor. It’s bad enough that she’s loud, but it’s even worse that she’s trying to save people — in her own way, at least.
Such generosity of spirit proves to be something of a trigger for a tousle-haired lost boy like Mike, who resents anyone for daring to offer him the help he doesn’t know how to accept. He’s pleasant enough to some of the people he recognizes from various shelters and the like, but when a good samaritan offers to buy Mike some food, our man returns the favor by violently mugging the man for his kindness.
And so it’s off to another stint in prison, the next part in a cycle that Mike seems ambivalent to escape. The film around him displays similarly little interest in forcing the matter, even after Mike is released from jail — now sober for seven months — and lands a job as a cook at a low-rent hotel on the outskirts of town. He makes friends with two of his co-workers, sings Atomic Kitten’s “Whole Again” at karaoke, and even attends a supervised reconciliation meeting with the man he beat up.
But Dickinson’s lithe and tetchy script only feigns at a clean hero’s journey in order to undercut it with the chaos of human behavior, and what might have been a nice three-act story about a moppet on the mend sours into something far less digestible or instructive (comparisons to “Naked” practically make themselves, and while “Urchin” lacks the sadism of Mike Leigh’s Thatcherite-era scream, it’s a credit to Dillane’s remarkable performance that the two movies seem capable of holding a conversation with each other).
Of course, “Urchin” is all the more rewarding for its messy approach to Mike’s disarray, which rejects a clear diagnosis in favor of honoring a character who feels like he can’t even afford to understand himself. Dickinson’s film — shaped by people he knew growing up, and further informed by his work with a variety of social outreach charities — reflects a mature, and frequently harrowing, recognition of how people can be held captive by the centrifugal force of their own behavioral patterns.
In this case, those patterns would appear to stretch back to childhood, as Dillane plays Mike as an overgrown kid — one entombed by the insouciant aloofness of someone who’s never quite understood the connection between actions and their consequences. Wearing the same blank expression on his face when he gets out of jail as he does when he’s first arrested, Mike always exists in the moment at hand, and in most situations remains unblinkingly honest about his circumstances (which would be more reassuring if he didn’t fantasize about his delusional future with the same nanchalance as he reflects on his troubled past).
If Mike is capable of sweetness or bursts of violence, that’s only because he’s equally capable of anything at all times, and considers all of his options to be more or less the same. When a customer at the restaurant complains about an undercooked burger, there’s no telling if Mike will implode or explode; solely motivated by emotional avoidance (as we see in the unforgettably brief scene where he’s reconciled with his assault victim), Mike makes no distinction between showing up to work or snorting ketamine on the beach, and lashes out at anyone who dares to suggest one choice might be better than the other.
That steadiness is central to Dillane’s magnetic performance, which always tacks closer to neediness than sociopathy, and never steers towards cheap sympathy or demonstrative rage. Mike is a troubled soul, but he’s not Anton Chigurh (even though he’s often just as stressful to observe); if he reliably makes the most self-destructive choice available to him, it’s only so frightening to watch because he’s so close to making a better one.
Alas, the shape of his life doesn’t bend toward salvation, just as Dickinson’s film doesn’t guide him towards any sort of narrative salvation. On the contrary, Josée Deshaies’ long lens cinematography flattens Mike into his environment, effectively drilling the overt movieness out of the scenes where he exists in public. That documentary-like sense of discovery is contrasted against a handful of hyper-stylized setpieces (including a dance sequence and several different trips into the recesses of Mike’s consciousness), as Dickinson eschews the film’s early faux-realism in favor of a more complex array of modes and feelings — a decision that makes “Urchin” as hard to pin down as its protagonist, and also allows Dickinson to cast himself in a small but pivotal role without disturbing some docudrama illusion of truth.
Where “Naked” tethered itself to the mania of a mad philosopher, Davdi Thewlis’ performance wavering somewhere between Jesus and the Devil, “Urchin” is bound to an unbreakable innocence that persists long after Mike has disabused us of our sympathy; he’s the victim of a cruel world, but also an unfeeling agent of its callousness. Dickinson clearly hopes this story will make it that much harder for people to dehumanize the homeless population, but the power of his film — and the promise of his intelligence as a filmmaker — is that it recognizes how a portrait of mottled ambivalence might better accomplish that goal than a million cheap sops of empathy.
Mike is plagued by the feeling that no one will let him in; that happiness is glowing from the other side of a window labeled “this is not for you.” That may not be enough to justify his persecution complex, but Dickinson’s terrific debut insists that the view from our side of the screen is just as clear as the one from Mike’s.
Grade: B+
“Urchin” premiered at the 2025 Cannes film festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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