Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Lola Campbell, Harris Dickinson, Alin Uzun
Intro:
… a comfort movie through and through, and it excels as such by showing a willingness to experiment with both its genre and its own technical expectations, channelling incredible warmth and even well-earned heartbreak without succumbing to the bleakness.
Within the larger tradition of British kitchen sink drama, the debut of writer-director Charlotte Regan represents something… different. It is just as focused on the British working class and the difficulties of youth surviving in hostile council environments, but Regan’s approach isn’t as fatalistic as the genre’s norm.
Her young heroine Georgie (Lola Campbell) is a rambunctious combination of Dickensian precociousness and Guy Ritchian brashness. Living on her own, after the untimely passing of her mother, she gets by on stealing bicycles and stripping them down for scrap to sell, all the while running her hustle as she works to keep social services out of her hair.
Campbell is absolutely brilliant, performing a perfect balancing act between the preternatural survival tactics of someone who had to grow beyond their years, while still making it abundantly clear that this is still a twelve-year-old.
Opposite her, we have Harris Dickinson continuing his hot streak (even when working on films that are lukewarm *cough*Where The Crawdads Sing*cough*) as her father Jason, suddenly appearing back in Georgie’s life and wanting to be the dad that she needs. Like Georgie, Jason is presented as someone whose mind and body seem to be out-of-sync with his actual age, sporting a frankly ridiculous blonde dye-job and seeming to struggle at adulting more than his own kid.
The relationship between them makes the crux of the film, as the overlap of arrested development and young parenthood gives them an odd blend of both father/daughter and brother/sister dynamics. When they bond over stealing bikes or making up what people at the train station are saying, it comes across less like Jason is doing this because he has to, and more that he finds this stuff just as entertaining as she does. It presents a typical ‘estranged parent and child reunite and learn from each other’ scenario, but with two people who realistically would learn from each other. There’s an equilibrium between them that gives the film consistent laughs and, later on, consistent gut-punches once the more emotional material makes itself known.
All of this is boosted by Charlotte Regan’s direction and how playful she and DP Molly Manning Walker get with the presentation. Running from the fuzz is shot like a found-footage horror film, a prolonged panic attack over a lost phone has editors Matteo Bini and Billy Sneddon provide pristine psychological cuts to convey the anxiety, and it even dips into rare kitchen sink surrealism with the tower of scrap that Georgie is working on throughout, not to mention the spider soap opera. Much like the story, and indeed Georgie herself, it bends and repurposes everyday clutter and turns it into something quite beautiful.
Scrapper is a comfort movie through and through, and it excels as such by showing a willingness to experiment with both its genre and its own technical expectations, channelling incredible warmth and even well-earned heartbreak without succumbing to the bleakness. It’s a story about people just trying to get by on what they can scrounge from their surroundings, and how even the most childish of activities become important if they can help us get through the grind of simply existing. To watch this is an act of self-care.
