Actor-turned-director Harris Dickinson’s feature directorial debut, Urchin (2025), follows Mike (Frank Dillane), a rough sleeper on the streets of London, tracing with relentless focus how a “loop of self-destruction”—shaped by addiction, poverty, and recurring bursts of impulsive violence and theft—slowly eats away at a life. Survival on the street ultimately leads to legal punishment, and after his release Mike attempts a “new beginning” through reintegration support and temporary housing. Yet each moment where institutional help meets personal resolve opens up another fault line, and he slips once more back toward the hard floor of reality.

Rooted in the lineage of British social realism, the film also disrupts that tradition by deliberately unsettling its camera and rhythm, pulling the viewer in through instability. Some critics have noted stretches whose mood and style evoke the Safdie brothers. Unsealed transitions, abrupt shifts in tempo, and rough, visibly imperfect joins translate both Mike’s precarious existence and the system’s failures into form. Dickinson directs and writes the film, and also appears on screen as Nathan. Urchin was invited to the Un Certain Regard section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it screened as a world premiere.