Urchin Review: Powerful Social Drama from Harris Dickinson

Harris Dickinson’s Homelessness Drama Urchin Is Powerfully Honest British Social Realism

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There are images of Britain in the cinema which may make for more popular exports – the boarding school fantasyland of Harry Potter, or the green and rarefied world of Austen – but it’s in its social realist films that Britain has always shown its truest self. Urchin, actor Harris Dickinson’s quietly assured feature debut as writer and director, has been made in the unvarnished and at times confrontationally honest tradition of the British kitchen sink drama. Its contemporary London, then, is not the comfortably middle-class city of Richard Curtis pictures, nor the landmark-centric postcard image of The Smoke that’s occasionally seen in the background of Hollywood blockbusters, but something close to the authentically divided and, for some, chronically unstable center of the UK circa 2025.

Urchin opens with homeless addict Mike (Frank Dillane) begging for change on the streets of London, invisible seemingly to all around him except for a passing stranger who, one day, offers to buy him something to eat. Seeing more value in his wristwatch than the offer of lunch, Mike assaults the man and robs him, for which Mike is arrested and sentenced to eight months in prison. Dickinson, most interested in how conditions in a modern free society can make a person like Mike, skips over the jail sentence to find Mike back in London, now living in temporary accommodation, working in the kitchen of a budget hotel and sober – at least for the moment.

Urchin more than occasionally looks like and has the immediate feel of a Ken Loach film, with its long lens scenes of Dillane interacting in real locations with figures who, as in the best of Loach, could be either non-actors or performers convincingly masquerading as them. There’s a touch here particularly of I, Daniel Blake, Loach’s 2016 picture about the precarious, threadbare state of modern Britain, a country which in Dickinson’s film is, almost a decade on, evidently still feeling the effects of austerity. (Mike’s dealings with tired or simply unavailable social workers suggests a welfare state that remains overstretched.)

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Where Urchin diverges from the work of the old master of British social realism is in its refusal to ever be didactic or present its desperate characters as noble poor. Dickinson clearly has enormous sympathy for Mike, and the filmmaker nods, often implicitly, to the environmental conditions that limit opportunities for people like him. In one scene, Mike and a pair of new friends end a night of revelry on the roof of a multistory car park, behind which in the distance glows Canary Wharf, these minimum-wage stragglers and London’s gleaming financial mecca somehow occupying the same city. Urchin‘s London most resembles that of Mike Leigh’s Naked: a city in which vagrants and working poor can exist at the center of the metropolis while remaining curiously disconnected from it.

Dickinson, though, also puts some of the responsibility for Mike’s situation on his protagonist. Partly the risk for Mike of him being released back into society is that Mike, who’s capable of breaking new relationships almost as soon as he makes them, is given the freedom to both succeed and self-destruct. Without judgement, Dickinson observes that an individual in a cycle of self-sabotage won’t necessarily be in a rush to help themselves out of it. Post-jail, Mike voluntarily sits down with the good Samaritan he mugged, but his evident growing discomfort in the meeting suggests it isn’t going the way he’d hoped. In another film, this might be a cathartic moment, Mike getting closure on a past ill deed while on his road to recovery, but in Dickinson’s film the meeting sends Mike spiraling, back down a path to him succumbing to his addictions.

Dickinson never allows his film to become a miserable experience, though. Joy and humor are found even in Urchin‘s tougher moments: Mike singing Atomic Kitten’s “Whole Again” at karaoke following a grueling hotel shift, or discovering that a fellow former addict (Dickinson in cameo) has landed himself shelter with an older woman in exchange for his becoming caretaker for her pet snake. There are magical realist touches, too, such as Mike dreaming of escaping his prison cell into a lush forest or (in what might be a narcotic hallucination) tumbling into an endless void. These sequences can feel somewhat incongruous, stylized interludes in a film that’s on its surest footing in a realist mode, though one final moment of fantasy ends the film on a satisfyingly ambiguous note.

The compassion that Dickinson has for his protagonist – that is, a measured compassion, which generously allows room for Mike to be despicable as well as charming – is matched by Dillane’s own evident feeling for the character. Though Dillane runs the emotional gamut, there’s no showboating in his performance, and the closest the actor gets to a soul-bearing monologue is in a scene in which Mike, having fallen off the wagon hard, makes a brief, barely coherent plea for charity to a bemused newsagent. It’s an astounding performance all the same, one that is, like Dickinson’s film on the whole, a modest work of complexity and power.

Director: Harris Dickinson
Writer: Harris Dickinson
Stars: Frank Dillane, Megan Northam, Karyna Khymchuk, Shonagh Marie, Amr Waked
Release date: Oct. 10, 2025

Brogan Morris is a London-based freelance writer and editor, whose writing on film can also be found at the BFI, The Guardian, BBC Culture and more. You can follow him on X formerly known as Twitter at @BroganJMorris.

Harris Dickinson’s Homelessness Drama Urchin Is Powerfully Honest British Social Realism