Cannes Review: Harris Dickinson’s Urchin is a Thoughtful and Adventurous Directorial Debut

A few scenes into Urchin, we take a trip through the Bardo. First the camera (as in a million films before this) closes in on a shower drain, but then something new: a tunnel of darkness and color that gives way to damp, mossy calm, where a lone man in a clearing, standing with his […] The post Cannes Review: Harris Dickinson’s Urchin is a Thoughtful and Adventurous Directorial Debut first appeared on The Film Stage.

May 21, 2025 - 02:05

Cannes Review: Harris Dickinson’s Urchin is a Thoughtful and Adventurous Directorial Debut

A few scenes into Urchin, we take a trip through the Bardo. First the camera (as in a million films before this) closes in on a shower drain, but then something new: a tunnel of darkness and color that gives way to damp, mossy calm, where a lone man in a clearing, standing with his back to us, is taking in the light. The director of this intrepid sequence is Harris Dickinson, who has found the time––somewhere between becoming a beloved actor and sex symbol and playing John Lennon––to direct a thoughtful, adventurous film.

This actor-to-auteur path is paved less with success stories than cautionary tales. Cannes seems to take a particular, almost sadistic delight in putting it under the spotlight––the potential for hubris certainly draws a crowd. In all the years I’ve been coming here, I have never seen another scene as undignified as the one outside the press screening for Ryan Gosling’s Lost River, a film that, for all intents and purposes, seems to no longer exist. Not that we should be surprised when they do come off: if these people spend their professional lives being directed, why wouldn’t they think of some ways to do it on their own?

Problems often arise in knowing which influences to choose. Some (as in the case of Greta Gerwig or Paul Dano) took the opportunity to give actors and colleagues the space to work that they, perhaps, weren’t always granted. At other times, the work of actor-directors appears like a mish-mash of aesthetics from filmmakers they’ve either worked with or admired. In Urchin, Dickinson blends issue-driven social realism (a British staple) with the trendier look of a Safdie film: all medium shots, real streets, non-professionals, and the occasional trip down a colorful drain. These might not always blend smoothly (this is an uneven film at the best of times) but it is an interesting combination that even expresses a clear political perspective.

Dickinson’s choices have always been intriguing. I think it’s particularly telling that since his breakout in Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats––not one of his best-known performances that could accurately be described as a lead role—he seems to like being off to the side, a character actor with the looks and charisma of a leading man. You can see those tendencies in Urchin, where he takes a small supporting role, apparently only after another actor pulled out. That modesty extends to mise-en-scène which never attempts to recreate, say, a Ruben Östlund social satire. If anything, the closest film in the Dickinson oeuvre is Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper––in financial terms, easily the smallest he’s made over the last several years.

Dickinson instead draws from his own experiences, firstly of growing up in East London, but also from his time working in the service industry. Frank Dillane plays Mike, a homeless and drug-addled young man who ends up in the slammer after violently assaulting and robbing a passerby who’d been trying to help him. Upon release, now a few months sober, he begins rehabilitation working as a commis chef in a hotel restaurant, making fast friends with colleagues until stresses of the job send him spiraling. Later, while working as a trash-collector, he meets a free-spirited woman named Andrea (Megan Northam) and the two form an intimate bond. In-between, Dickinson grants Mike some brief moments of catharsis: firstly at a karaoke booth (singing Atomic Kitten) and later, more viscerally, while high on K at a performance space.

There’s little there we haven’t seen before, and probably some things we’ve seen more often than we’d like, but Dickinson deserves credit for using such a well-worn framework to not only say something about homelessness in the UK and challenges of the welfare system, but also to platform his actor––Dillane is a fine presence with sharp comic timing, though perhaps a bit too good-looking for the role (I could think of a few high-street fashion stores that would hire him, however disheveled)––while flexing his own creative muscles in the process. Though the shower drain is Urchin‘s coup de grace, there are others that caught me off guard––not least the abbey floor that seems to pull Mike towards it, flinging him along like a rag doll. If the 28-year-old Dickinson ever finds time to make another feature, I will be seated.

Urchin premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

The post Cannes Review: Harris Dickinson’s Urchin is a Thoughtful and Adventurous Directorial Debut first appeared on The Film Stage.