{"id":170408,"date":"2025-09-30T12:53:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T12:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/170408\/"},"modified":"2025-09-30T12:53:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T12:53:09","slug":"urchin-review-tackles-homelessness-with-deep-empathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/170408\/","title":{"rendered":"Urchin Review \u2013 ‘Tackles homelessness with deep empathy’"},"content":{"rendered":"

After living on the streets of London for five years, Mike (Frank Dillane) tries to turn his life around.<\/p>\n

Actors making the transition to directing are a dime a dozen, but there\u2019s something special about Urchin, Harris Dickinson<\/a>\u2019s feature debut. Sure, he\u2019s navigated his career so far with impeccable taste, working with the likes of Joanna Hogg and Steve McQueen<\/a>, but as a filmmaker he\u2019s more than just a sponge for his collaborators \u2014 he\u2019s a fresh and original artist in his own right.<\/p>\n

\"Urchin\"<\/p>\n

In the impersonal expanse of London, Dickinson finds a personal story. Mike (Frank Dillane) has been sleeping rough in any dark corner he can find for a number of years. When one unassuming stranger offers to buy him a sandwich, Mike mugs him and lands himself time behind bars. After his release, he\u2019s sober and takes up a cooking job at a budget hotel \u2014 but Mike\u2019s self-sabotaging tendencies prevent him from holding on to employment. At any gesture of sincere generosity, he retaliates.<\/p>\n

Dickinson\u2019s taut screenplay finds pockets of levity in this slice-of-life story. For a moment, Mike seems almost comfortable: he slowly opens himself up to friendship at his cooking gig before singing Atomic Kitten at karaoke with his new pals. That temporary lightness only heightens the frustration of his inability to turn away from the chaos.<\/p>\n

The film refreshingly evades simple answers.<\/p>\n

Mike\u2019s volatile behaviour is disheartening, especially when he appears just within touching-distance of stability \u2014 but Dickinson treats his protagonist with empathy and understanding. Destructive cycles are difficult to escape, and when a system of bureaucracy and austerity treats you like you\u2019re worthless for long enough, you may even begin to internalise that sentiment. Mike is as much a victim of odds stacked impossibly high as he is of his own impulses.<\/p>\n

Dillane is outstanding in his first major starring turn, his character hiding behind bouts of charm \u2014 undoubtedly a protective mechanism for concealing Mike\u2019s inescapable pain. And in a part so distant from the magnetic leading men he\u2019s become known for, Dickinson also appears as Mike\u2019s twitchy friend Nathan, in a similarly tough situation.<\/p>\n

With Dickinson and cinematographer Jos\u00e9e Deshaies keeping characters at a distance with observational wide shots, Mike appears lost precisely because he feels impossible to reach. And when Urchin is not wading knee-deep in the grand tradition of British social realism, the film cuts to surreal, visually hypnotic sequences \u2014 a cave, a church \u2014 that appear to dive into Mike\u2019s subconscious. The film refreshingly evades simple answers in that regard, forgoing pity in favour of illustrating the complex humanity of someone who\u2019s been made to believe they\u2019re not worth saving.<\/p>\n

In tackling homelessness with deep empathy, one of our most exciting young actors proves himself to be a bold new voice in British filmmaking. Leave some talent for the rest of us, Dickinson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After living on the streets of London for five years, Mike (Frank Dillane) tries to turn his life…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170409,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-170408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}