Metacritic reviews

While you ponder the tragedy of what you just witnessed, you are left stunned by how talented Dickinson and Dillane are. It’s the kind of work that makes you excited to see what they do next.

Dickinson clearly hopes this story will make it that much harder for people to dehumanize the homeless population, but the power of his film — and the promise of his intelligence as a filmmaker — is that it recognizes how a portrait of mottled ambivalence might better accomplish that goal than a million cheap sops of empathy.

It is engaging and sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory setpiece sequences, and is challengingly incorrect thoughts about the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.

Urchin would be nothing without a gifted, vanity-free actor (the lead is the son of Stephen Dillane) who has clearly dug deep into the milieu of addiction and homelessness and is willing to go anywhere the script takes his character — from rapturous highs to desperate lows and all their consequent indignities.

This gritty social realist character study is spiked with striking and unexpected detours.

This is a full character that Dillane and Dickinson have built from the ground up, where the little details of how he reacts to things can tear right through when you least expect it.

The film makes no claims to represent an entire disenfranchised demographic, but there’s resonant human texture and political feeling in its close-up individual portrait.

Harris Dickinson steps behind the camera for a bruising, brilliantly strange debut that channels veteran auteurs like Jonathan Glazer and Andrea Arnold, while carving out a distinctive voice all its own.

With a phenomenal performance from Frank Dillane and a thoughtful, open approach to those who lose their way in life, Urchin is a worthy contribution to the cinematic portfolio of British realism.

Urchin puts forward a sensitive, promising director. And an even more promising writer.