No good deed goes unpunished in Urchin, a London-set character study that shows so much sophisticated and worldly wisdom it’s hard to believe that its writer, director and co-star is only 28 years old. Built around a charismatic performance from Frank Dillane, best known for his role as recovering heroin addict Nick Clark in AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, Harris Dickinson’s remarkable feature debut takes the tropes of socially conscious British cinema and fashions a deceptively nuanced cautionary tale that isn’t so much about the failings of that society as our own personal capacity for self-destruction.
At the center of the drama is Michael (Dillane), who we find sleeping rough, woken up by city noise and the earnest entreaties of a largely ignored street preacher. In a subtle moment that tells you exactly who he is, Michael rudely pushes past her, then sets about his day. After charging his phone, begging for change and socializing at a soup kitchen, he realizes that his wallet has gone missing, stolen by his junkie friend Nathan (Dickinson). Dirty, scruffy and scarily intense, Michael accosts horrified passers-by to ask if they’ve seen him. “He’s wearing blue trousers and there’s blood on his face,” he says, and they react exactly as you think they might, and probably would yourself.
Filmed in covert (improvised?) documentary-style situations, Michael is all but invisible thus far, and his interactions with the public feel so real that it’s actually quite jarring when the film makes an abrupt segue from its loose so-far, so-verité aesthetic to tight drama with the film’s shocking defining incident. After Michael finds Nathan outside a busy office building, a confrontation ensues, drawing in a good Samaritan, Simon, who diffuses the tension and offers to buy Michael lunch. In lieu of a thank-you, Michael waits until his benefactor’s guard is down, assaults him, then steals his watch and pawns it.
Michael’s ensuing eight-month prison sentence is handled in the most extraordinary way; as he showers, naked and vulnerable, the camera pans down to follow the falling water as it circles the drain then goes down, down and even further down, to the darkest depths of the ocean, even. And then, before you know it, Michael is out of captivity and back in society, encouraged by sympathetic social worker Nadia, who finds him a hostel, and employed by Franco, the kind-hearted manager of a hotel that we hear described by its guests as “a shithole,” who offers him work as a prep cook in his kitchen.
This is where the film gets interesting. Can Michael hold the job down after living so long in the margins? He seems to want to try, committing to getting himself sober and boasting to Nadia of an alcohol-free night doing karaoke with a couple of female workmates, joining in as they sing the cheesy but emotional “Whole Again” by ill-starred ’90s British girl group Atomic Kitten. He even listens to a self-help CD, and its holistic gibberish seems to be taking hold as he tries to take control of his new freedom.
In fact, he becomes so comfortable that he agrees to a conciliatory meeting with his victim, Simon, who bears no malice but, more damagingly, articulates the question Michael has been running away from all these years: Why did he do it? The scene is uncomfortable and oddly brief; unusually for an actor-director, Dickinson doesn’t go in for showy scenes and leaves a lot to be inferred. But the things he leaves out are every bit as powerful as the things he leaves in; this meeting triggers a reaction in Michael, a voracious, cancerous, near-Cronenbergian self-loathing that devours his self-esteem.
RELATED: Full List Of Cannes Palme d’Or Winners Through The Years: Photo Gallery
Read the digital edition of Deadline’s Disruptors/Cannes magazine here.
This kind of unraveling isn’t that new in the pantheon of British kitchen-sink dramas, but what is quite startling is the film’s clear-eyed, unsentimental portrayal of Michael as the author of his own tragedy. Dillane is quite the revelation in this respect; his backstory is lightly sketched, aside from a few references to his adoptive parents, but somehow it’s all there. With his incongruous RP accent and oddly naive façade, he’s quite likely posher than he lets on, but there’s a sense that his street smarts have long since obliterated that past, that identity. Toward the end, he watches, with detachment, as a snake devours a mouse. Survival is his game, an addict’s mindset described by author William S. Burroughs as the algebra of need (“The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain”).
This might seem like cold right-wing rhetoric in today’s charity-averse world, but Dickinson’s film is more complex than that. It doesn’t tell us to help the needy; it wants us to see that sometimes the needy can’t and won’t accept that help. Likewise, Urchin doesn’t offer any answers, nor does it try, but it does open up a conversation about the people who fall through the cracks. Dillane is key here, whether pacing the streets in tacky charity-shop gear or invading people’s spaces with his spidery, unwanted attention. It’s to the credit of both that the film lands its ending, a strangely poetic but unexpectedly moving knockout. A vision of purgatory, perhaps, or an X-ray of a man who somehow lost his soul.
Title: Urchin
Festival: Cannes (Un Certain Regard)
Director-screenwriter: Harris Dickinson
Cast: Frank Dillane, Megan Northam, Amr Waked, Karyna Khymchuk, Shonagh Marie
Sales agent: Charades
Running time: 1 hr 39 min
RELATED: Croisettiquette: Your Guide To The Dos And Don’ts Of The Strictest Red Carpet In The World
