'Scrapper' Is A Thin But Fierce Little Debut Film
We’ve been lucky to experience a wealth of striking debut films by British female directors over the past few years. Some trade in devastating arthouse aesthetics, like Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean, or Cannes prizewinner How to Have Sex by Molly Manning Walker. Some lean into intense genre sensibilities to tell original and memorable stories, like Saint Maud (Rose Glass), Rye Lane (Raine Allen-Miller), and Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell). Scrapper, the debut from acclaimed shorts director Charlotte Regan, couldn’t have come at a better moment, sitting somewhere in the middle of poppy and arthouse – telling a small-scale story of a precocious 12-year-old confronting her father’s absence on a council estate after her mother passed.
Scrapper is eye-catching, painting its working-class estate in pastel colors, diving into the mind of its protagonist, Georgie (Lola Campbell), with the help of video-game dialogue boxes and her neighbors fleshed out in When Harry Met Sally-esque testimonials shot in charming vignetted aspect ratios. There’s a lot of MTV music video DNA in Regan’s visuals, a fittingly animated way to depict the world of a secretly-lost-at-sea pre-teen. But there’s a critical difference between an overblown but psychologically revealing style and one that insists upon itself – Scrapper struggles to balance aesthetics that demand attention with emotional plotting that aims for graceful simplicity but ends up frustratingly slight.
Georgie, clad in a West Ham shirt she doesn’t know belongs to her absent father, lives alone after her mum succumbed to illness. She nicks and fences bikes to pay rent and gets the clerk at the corner shop to pretend to be a relative to trick social workers that she’s being cared for. Together with her friend Ali (Alin Uzun), she maintains a front of self-sufficiency that we know, if she doesn’t, can’t last forever. The first act patiently lays out the whole ecosystem of Georgie’s life, a vibrant and hermetically-sealed bubble that, under the glitz and pep, acts like a purgatory for the necessary emotional growth she must soon face.
