‘Urchin’ Review: Stumbling Toward Redemption on the Streets of London
A homeless young man in London hits rock bottom, only to find an unexpected path toward rehabilitation after a brief stint in jail tests his resolve to rebuild his life.
London’s streets may look charming and picturesque to tourists, but for those who sleep on them they can be unforgiving terrain. In the directorial debut of British actor Harris Dickinson (Babygirl), his colleague Frank Dillane (Fear the Walking Dead) plays Mike, a young man living rough when we first meet him—panhandling, hauling his few belongings from place to place, grabbing a meal in a shelter, surviving on scraps and luck. We learn nothing about his backstory, but that’s not where the film’s focus lies.
Drawing on elements of Mike Leigh’s cinema (with Naked as the most obvious touchstone), Urchin pivots when Mike’s lowest point becomes an unexpected opening. After he’s mugged, he gets into a fight with another homeless man (played by Dickinson himself) and is eventually helped by a sympathetic passerby. Mike thanks him, walks a few blocks with him… and then decks him, steals his wallet and watch, and gets arrested almost immediately. Curiously—or perhaps not—his short stint in jail turns out to be a possible way forward.
Much of Urchin’s tight running time is devoted to Mike’s attempts at recovery and rehabilitation, set in motion by the social services network: after his release, he’s given a few weeks in a hostel and help finding a kitchen job. Keeping that fragile progress going will depend on his ability to manage by himself—staying away from drugs, alcohol, and bad company, and trying to swallow the small, constant humiliations of everyday life without lashing out.
Alongside the film’s grounded, realist approach—Mike works alongside friendly immigrant cooks or joins a crew of aging hippies cleaning up parks—Dickinson introduces a brief and faintly odd element that hovers between the dreamlike and the fantastical. It feels completely out of step with the rest of the film. Thankfully, it’s confined to just a few scenes, but they seem imported from a different movie, or from an early draft of the script that should probably have stayed on the cutting-room floor.
Aside from those curious detours, Urchin is sharp, affecting, and quietly unsettling. We never fully know Mike’s backstory, but we sense that a certain level of intimacy or emotional friction knocks him off balance. He can seem pleasant, likable, even moderately hopeful—but it’s clear that he lives close to an edge, and that the slightest spark could trigger a much darker side. And, unsurprisingly, the film doesn’t take long to put that volatility back in his path.
What gives Urchin its humanistic glow—and saves it from slipping into easy miserabilism—is Dickinson’s compassion for Mike and, more broadly, for anyone living on the streets or scraping by well below the poverty line. Some characters sleep in tents, cars, or makeshift trailer-like structures parked illegally. The film may be tough, even bleak, in its depiction of this world, but it tries to understand its characters rather than judge them, aligning itself with their point of view and observing how they navigate the daily adventure of survival.
