6th November 2023
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Harris Dickinson’s first feature as a director, (having previously directed some shorts and music videos) Urchin is a strong, if slightly too safe film.
A character study, the film centres on Mike (played by Frank Dillane), the film’s eponymous urchin.
We fellow Mike as a young man living on the streets of London attempting to find a kind of stability, meanwhile struggling with employment, sobriety and his inherently self-destructive nature.
In his presentation of the film’s subject matter, Dickinson broadly succeeds. Never veering into a sermonising agitprop polemic or a sentimental canonisation of its protagonist, he sensitively handles Mike’s homelessness.
Instead, Dickinson in a quietly empathetic manner, presents Mike as a figure defined as much by his flaws as he is by his strengths.
As the film’s lead, Dillane play the part of Mike brilliantly, carrying many of the film’s trickier narrative beats with such an ease that one suspects the film to be a lesser work without him.
Hence, Dillane plays Frank as a young man trapped in a freefall of his own self-destructive making, capable of both callous violence and naïve vulnerability, meanwhile reaching out for and pushing away any kind of understanding, be that of himself, or of others.
Like many first features however, Urchin is slightly disjointed in its cohesion and could have perhaps benefitted from a tighter edit. Certain scenes run slightly too long, and others run too short. Meanwhile, certain symbolic gestures towards the end of the film are perhaps too keen to state their significance, and could have instead been treated with the same sort of subtly and nuance present earlier in the film.
Yet, as an entry into the tradition of social realism in British film, Urchin is no doubt a successful, mature picture capturing, with nuance, the joys and despairs of Mike’s solitary existence.
Poster credit to the film’s distributors.
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