Urchin is an award winning, raw, impactful British drama that plunges into the gritty reality of life on the margins. Directed and written by Harris Dickinson in his feature debut, this is British social-realism cinema at its most visceral and alive. He is certainly a huge talent and one to watch for the future with undertones of the best work of the great Ken Loach.
The story follows Mike (Frank Dillane), a homeless young man in London caught in a cycle of addiction, theft and institutional failure. After prison and short-lived hopes of reintegration, he finds himself haunted by internal demons and a mysterious woman playing violin in the street. Dillane (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) is captivating and delivers a haunting, unpredictable performance, and he is joined by Megan Northam (Rabia) playing Andrea, a glimmer of hope in Mike's world.
Stylistically, the film is really creative combining stark urban landscapes with surreal intrusions, a drain-pipe shot plunging into darkness, a floating violin beneath city lights, offering a visual poetry that echoes themes of dislocation, identity and the invisibility of the under-class. Thematically it confronts trauma, the invisible social safety net, and the thin line between chance and collapse.
At its world premiere in the Cannes Film Festival, the film earned the FIPRESCI Prize and Dillane took home Best Actor. If you're drawn to uncompromising, humane storytelling in that great British tradition of entertaining but also challenging you rather than comforting you, this film is essential viewing.
You might enjoy this film if you liked I, Daniel Blake (2016), The Florida Project (2017) and Naked (1993).
