Harris Dickinson, the consistently exciting star of Beach Rats, Triangle of Sadness, and Babygirl, takes an impressive leap behind the camera with Urchin.
The actor’s directorial debut – one of three from this year’s Cannes film festival, alongside the efforts of Kristen Stewart and Scarlett Johansson – is a simultaneously gritty and surreal portrait of a man clinging to recovery.
Set in the less salubrious corners of east London, Urchin follows Mike (Frank Dillane), a homeless addict whose attempts at stability and sobriety are constantly undone by old habits and a society all too willing to let him slip through the cracks.
Dillane, best known for roles in Fear the Walking Dead and Harry Potter, gives a revelatory performance as the twitchy, unpredictable but often charming hero.
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Early in the film a stranger offers him lunch. Mike assaults him, steals his watch and says sorry. Neither Dickinson nor Dillane plays the scene for shock value. It’s simply the complicated reality of a distrustful societal reject.
Megan Northam adds melancholy notes as Andrea, a drifting soul who briefly gives Mike hope before dragging him back to certain dissolution.
There’s a deep empathy running through Urchin, yet the film fervently resists sentimentality. Dickinson’s camera lingers on the mundane – peeling wallpaper, cigarette breaks, the drywall in tiny caravans – but just as often slips into fantasy. Josée Deshaies’s cinematography captures the grime and grace of life on society’s edge.
Dickinson plays a small role as Mike’s antagonistic friend, but everything rests on Dillane’s powerhouse turn and the writer-director’s compassionate, daring script. Reveries frequently take Mike and the audience to a darkened cave; a prison shower spirals into a psychedelic portal, amplifying his disorientation and remove from reality.
These visual flourishes set Urchin apart from traditional kitchen-sink social realism, intersecting with both Andrea Arnold’s similarly dreamy Bird and the helter-skelter energies of the Safdie brothers’ Good Time.
In cinemas from Friday, October 3rd
