What’s going on below the city’s streets? Filmmaker John Harlacher’s Urchin revisits that recurring theme and imagines an entire subterranean world below the streets of NYC. His distorted underworld, Scum City, is a homeless camp that exists in Manhattan’s subway tunnels and is enough to cause nightmares.
The leader of Scum City is the Old Man (Larry Swansen), who swears to lead his followers to the promised land of Agharta, an elusive Camelot, if they smoke the Blessed Blue Crystal and help him find the Five Nobles. The Kid (Sebastian Montoya), a homeless boy abused and discarded by society, yearns to find that paradise. The Old Man promises to take him there if he can sell all of the magic blue crystal. Much of the film focuses on the Kid’s efforts to do just that as he becomes a little meth dealer. At one point he finds himself in the midst of a plot to “crush human freedom,” and he also manages to save humankind and even find a bit of kindness within himself when he meets the Father (Donald Silva), who lost his daughter in a car accident. Julia, the youngest Scum Cityite, looks exactly like his lost child and, in an act of true selflessness, The Kid puts Julia on the father’s doorstep, giving both a new life. He also meets a wretched soul, appropriately named Goliath (Rick Poli), who claims that he can distinguish a smell between souls. His twisted sense of reality is a true reflection of the ongoing conflict between the haves and have nots and the depth of human pain felt by being an outcast.
Harlacher wrote, directed and produced the indie himself, and it successfully examines the soulless nature of living in a materialist world and how one’s senseless acts can cause death and destruction for many others. The Kid’s quest is replete with vivid images, and the simple film techniques and lack of special effects makes his world all the more distorted and dark (rhythmic music also adds to the intensity of his journey). This lurid urban fantasy has already inspired a role playing game—and watch out for the videogame later this year.
