Urchin: a harsh, humane trip through London’s margins
- In cinemas 3 October 2025 across the UK, with a focused indie and arthouse rollout.
- Starring Frank Dillane, Megan Northam, Shonagh Marie and Amr Waked.
- British social drama with surreal edges, built for intimate big-screen viewing rather than franchise spectacle.
- Set in East London’s hostels, backstreets and night buses, where addiction, poverty and frayed services quietly drag people under.
- Explores relapse, self-sabotage, small acts of kindness and the uncomfortable gap between seeing the homeless and actually seeing them.
Story in one sentence
Homeless addict Mike claws at sobriety and connection while old habits, bad decisions and a tired system keep tugging him back into the void.
Setting the scene
Thrown straight onto the streets
Urchin arrives in UK cinemas on 3 October 2025 as actor Harris Dickinson’s feature directing debut, and it feels lived-in from the first frame. You’re dropped into East London with Mike already on the streets, already hustling, already one bad choice away from another night in a cell.
The film doesn’t waste time on neat origin stories or voice-over explanations. You piece together fragments – adoption, family distance, old friends, half-forgotten jobs – in the same messy way you’d learn about a stranger you keep passing on the high road.
A cycle Mike can’t break
Very quickly, Dickinson lays out the cycle Mike is stuck in as petty scams slide into nastier violence. A theft, some CCTV and a fast arrest lead to a stint inside that feels less like punishment and more like someone hitting a pause button.
When Mike walks out of prison with a bin bag and a warning, that’s where the real story starts. The film is less about the crime and more about whether one man can actually grab the handholds offered to him without letting go or losing himself.
Characters and performances
Mike: fragile centre of the film
Frank Dillane’s performance is the main reason the film works as well as it does. He gives Mike a jittery physicality and a wary charm that makes you understand why people both recoil from him and feel compelled to help.
There are moments when Mike is infuriating, manipulative and downright cruel. Dillane never flinches from that, but he also lets flashes of shame, grief and goofy humour slip through, and those contradictions make him feel painfully real.
Andrea and the limits of care
Megan Northam’s Andrea could easily have been written as a stock “saviour love interest”. Instead, she comes across as a young woman who likes Mike, cares about him, but has a life and limits of her own, which the film respects.
Their scenes together – fag breaks behind the workplace, awkward flirtations, quiet check-ins after relapses – are some of the gentlest in the film. You feel Andrea thinking, constantly, about how much of herself she can realistically pour into this man without drowning as well.
Franco and the wider community
Amr Waked plays Franco, a restaurant owner who offers Mike a tentative rung on the ladder. He isn’t a saint or a villain; he’s a small businessman making a risky hire, trying to balance empathy with the reality that kitchens can’t run on good intentions alone.
Smaller turns from Shonagh Marie and Karyna Khymchuk give texture to the hostel and street scenes. They sketch out a wider world of people stuck in similar loops, each with their own coping mechanisms and fragile alliances.
How the film handles homelessness and addiction
No neat moral lesson
One of Urchin’s strengths is how it refuses to tidy up homelessness into a neat moral lesson. There’s bureaucracy, charity and “support”, but nothing works like a magic key, and the film is honest about how patchy and conditional help can be.
Addiction is handled with the same blunt compassion. You see the high, the comedown, the ugly behaviour and the self-loathing, but you’re never nudged to treat Mike as either a monster or an angel trapped in the wrong body.
Restorative justice without sugar-coating
The restorative justice scene, where Mike faces the man he assaulted, is a good example of the film’s approach. It isn’t staged as a healing TED Talk; it’s halting, awkward and leaves both men with as many questions as answers.
Throughout, Dickinson pushes you to sit with your own discomfort. When Mike lashes out at someone trying to help, it’s tempting to give up on him, and the film knows that; it asks why we find it easier to blame individuals than the structures they’re stuck in.
Style, tone and those surreal flourishes
Realism with a cigarette haze
On the surface this is classic British social realism: handheld camera, natural light, real locations and a lot of smoking outside grim buildings. That grounded style makes the occasional surreal image land even harder.
Surreal images as mental maps
Recurring shots of a mysterious violinist and a descent into an almost mythic underground space might sound indulgent, but they mostly work. They feel like visualisations of the mental trap Mike is in – the sense that he’s being pulled towards some dark, inescapable place, even when his body is walking through Hackney or Bethnal Green.
Sound and mood
The sound design quietly knits all this together. Distant sirens, hostel doors slamming, night buses sighing at stops and the scratch of violin strings bleed into Alan Myson’s score, keeping you slightly on edge even in supposedly calm scenes.
Balancing grit and grace
Tonal balance is tricky in stories like this, and Urchin mostly gets it right. There are funny, messy, even joyful moments – bad karaoke, daft jokes, shared roll-ups – but the film never forgets how quickly a good night can turn sour.
Standout moments
The opening scam and assault
The opening scam and assault sequence sets the bar for tension. You can practically feel the audience willing Mike not to go through with the theft, and the sense of inevitability when he does is horrible in the best, most effective way.
Calm in the kitchen
Later, a quieter standout sees Mike working in a hotel kitchen, finally seeming to find a rhythm. Watching him plate up dishes, joke with colleagues and just be another bloke on a shift is oddly moving, because you can feel how fragile that normality is.
When a night out collapses
A brutal nightclub sequence, where drink, drugs and paranoia collide, snaps that normality in half. The way Dillane plays the shift from lively to threatening is queasily believable, and you understand why doors start shutting again once the dust settles.
An ending that divides
The final cave-like descent will split viewers. For some it will feel like a bold, emotional metaphor for relapse or oblivion; for others it will be a step too far into art-film abstraction after ninety minutes of grimy realism.
What doesn’t quite land
Thin supporting threads
For all its power, Urchin isn’t perfect. Some of the supporting characters – especially in the probation and charity world – feel more like types than fully fleshed people, even if the acting is solid.
Repetition in the middle stretch
There are stretches in the middle where the cycle of “small win, setback, relapse” starts to feel repetitive. You could argue that this is the point, but a couple of scenes hit the same emotional beat without adding much new insight.
Surreal touches that won’t suit everyone
The surreal imagery, while striking, occasionally jars. A few viewers will likely wish Dickinson either pushed it further or reined it in more, rather than hovering in a slightly uneasy middle ground.
None of these issues derail the film, but they do stop it from feeling truly surprising moment to moment. You can sense the debut-feature jitters in the structure, even as individual scenes sing.
Who this is for – and whether it’s worth a cinema trip
When it hits hardest
If you’re into character-driven British drama and you can handle addiction stories that don’t soften the edges, Urchin is absolutely worth catching in the cinema. The big screen doesn’t add explosions or spectacle, but it does lock your attention onto Mike in a way home viewing might not.
Not one for easy escapism
It’s a tougher sell if you’re craving escapism. This is ninety-nine minutes of living alongside someone most of society tries not to look at, with no guarantee of a cathartic turnaround to send you out smiling.
Final verdict
For people with lived experience of addiction, homelessness or the probation system, parts of the film may cut very close to the bone. The honesty is precisely what makes it valuable, but it also means you might want to know your own limits before you buy a ticket.
As an October 2025 release, though, Urchin earns its place near the top of the month’s conversation. It’s harsh, thoughtful and properly acted, and it marks Harris Dickinson as a filmmaker who clearly has more to say about the people most of us step around on the pavement.