The debut feature of Charlotte Regan, a 29-year-old Londoner who has spent most of her career directing music videos for local rappers, doesn’t stray far from her stomping ground. Scrapper, which won a Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, takes place in east London, where a scrappy 12-year-old, Georgie (newcomer Lola Campbell), grieving the recent loss of her mother to cancer, insists on bringing herself up on her own. As the first intertitle says, crossing out “It takes a village to raise a child”: “I’ll raise myself thanks.” She and her best friend, the slightly older Ali (another newcomer, Alin Uzun) run a stolen-bikes ring, as Georgie persuades clueless social workers that she’s staying with her uncle, “Winston Churchill”.
Despite her dogged and careful self-reliance – compulsively vacuuming the flat, speaking with a persuasive power far beyond her years, even convincing a woman that she isn’t in the process of stealing her bike – a man shows up. Georgie’s 30-year-old father (Harris Dickinson, of Triangle of Sadness) returns one day from Spain, ready to make good. That won’t be so easy: Georgie, tiny even for her age, is dead set on her independence. Will she succeed in driving her father away? Obviously not – slowly but surely, she opens up to him, and they discover that they have far more in common than they thought, a phrase which is stated nearly verbatim. There are few surprises in Scrapper, except its sickly sweetness: the girl is pushy but sweet, the friend is messy but sweet, the father is tough but sweet. Everyone is sweet: so is its twee style.
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