3.9 KiB
title, date, draft, series, summary, imdb, poster, tags, runtime, year, director, genres
| title | date | draft | series | summary | imdb | poster | tags | runtime | year | director | genres | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Urchin | 2025-12-25 15:53:35+00:00 | false | Frank's Couch | I watched movie that felt very real and led me to refelct on mylife. Felt almost like I could have escaped into the tv screen. | tt35715953 | /images/posters/urchin.jpg |
|
100 | 2025 | Harris Dickinson |
|
{{< imdbposter >}}
| Date watched | December 14, 2025 |
|---|---|
| Show Time | Evening |
| Theater | Home Video |
| Theater Number | Living Room |
| Pizza | No |
| Media | Online |
| Letterboxd Rating | ***** (5.0) |
| Screen | 4k TV |
{{< /imdbposter >}}
I wrote a short paragraph on Letterboxd right after watching Urchin (2025). If you want the quick version, read it here:
My Letterboxd review
Directed by Frank Delaney and starring Mike Carter (Will Parker) and Nathan Reed (Julian Pierce), Urchin focuses on homelessness, addiction, and survival without the typical cinematic buffer that sanitizes those topics. It’s not poverty as an aesthetic or a redemption tourism kind of story. It’s practical: where you wake up, where you can pee, whether you have a blanket, how you get through the hour before you can think about the day. Survival is the real drumbeat of the movie.
In the early 2000s, I spent time either homeless or crashing wherever I could. I’m not Mike, and I haven’t had the same relationship to addiction, but the urgency, dull terror, and logistical problem-solving of "simply existing" rang painfully true. The film understands that the path down and the path back up are not the same and are unique to each individual. People may fall at any point. Luck is as important as genuine effort. There’s no moral grading scale for survival.
The supporting characters feel lived-in rather than just popping into existence. Andrea (Marissa Vale), the RE counselor holding everything together with spit and hope, is painfully believable. It’s my understanding that in the US there is even less support once you get out. You have to rely on religious organizations for the most part. The friend with a couch isn’t a trope; she’s the connective tissue of the community. Nathan’s shift from dealing drugs to being a kept man isn’t framed as a downfall or escape, it’s just a path. A path you might not take, but still recognize.
Homelessness here feels like slipping into a parallel layer of the city—almost like putting on the ring of power in Lord of the Rings. You aren’t literally gone, but to most people you might as well be. They don’t see you; they sense you the way someone senses a draft in the room. Only those already inside that layer other "ring-wearers", people who know the signs and the reality can actually perceive you. In that hidden layer, there are networks and hierarchies, violence and kindness, boredom and jokes, grudges and rules. A small world, but a complete one. The film captures how it can feel both tiny and overwhelmingly complex at the same time.
I don’t want to overshare or claim authority I don’t have; I got lucky in ways others didn’t. My mother giving me her old car at eighteen, and being willing to take me back in when I realized I was not going to get back on my feet alone really changed the trajectory of my life. The film never pretends that Mike’s path applies universally. That’s why it works. Stories aren’t interchangeable.
There’s a line about "a gap in empathy" that stuck with me. It’s the gap people fall into long before they fall between jobs or into the street—the gap where being unseen turns into being unreal. Urchin doesn’t try to rescue anyone from that gap. It just asks you to look into it.