Urchin

“Mike” (Frank Dillane) isn’t a bad man, he’s just an addict, down on his luck and living on the streets of an unforgiving London. The social services manage to find him a room in an hostel and even a ... “Mike” (Frank Dillane) isn’t a bad man, he’s just an addict, down on his luck and living on the streets of an unforgiving London. The social services manage to find him a room in an hostel and even a job washing dishes at an hotel restaurant, but his path to the straight and narrow is anything but yellow-bricked and with temptation never far away and his frustrations made worse by his new relationship with a colleague who only seems to manage to make matters worse, things are not looking rosy. What might he do to escape this self-perpetuating cycle? Now this is not a film that offers us solutions. Nor does it move along sharpishly. It is more of a fly-on-the-wall observation of a young, vaguely charismatic, man who is trapped in a maelstrom of his own, and of a complicit society’s, making. Whilst under the protection of some sort of blanket, he has a chance. When left to his own devices, well he even bites one of the hands that tries to feed him - and that leads to prison and then a reconciliation meeting with his victim that seems to further emphasise his lack of direction. It’s not a great film, it does meander a bit too often and it certainly lacks focus at times, but somehow that can work to present us with something quite grittily plausible about life amongst the homeless in a big city where they are considered probably as much of a nuisance as the pigeons - only cared for less. Auteur Harris Dickinson has form in this space with “Postcards from London” (2018) in that he is not averse to exposing an underbelly of society that isn’t always the easiest to absorb, and here he uses a solid effort from Dillane to illuminate something of a sub-culture that most of us cross the road to avoid. He didn’t cast himself in the lead role, though he does feature sparingly with a big snake (not an euphemism) and so he has left himself the opportunity to create better from behind the camera and what we have here is, I think, something quite honest. Low budget and a bit rough around the edges from a production perspective, it is, but coupled with a carefully selected soundtrack it works better than I was expecting.