An irresponsible father comes back into the life of his 12-year-old daughter, who has got on perfectly well without him. Harris Dickinson stars in this touching film that won an award at the Sundance Film Festival.
Regardless of her youth, enterprising Georgie (Lola Campbell) is already able to deal with problems on her own. She lives in a small house that she inherited from her mother, who died recently. Georgie pays the rent herself, using the money she makes with her friend Ali by selling stolen bikes. She does an excellent impersonation of an adult voice when she needs to answer the phone to social services, thanks to recorded voice messages from another adult friend. One day a young man with a fashionable haircut climbs the fence at Georgie’s house. He turns out to be her father, who she has never seen. But the young heroine has no need of a father. She is only worried about the valuable contents of her phone, on which she keeps playing a video of her mother, the only reminder of her.
This touching debut by director Charlotte Regan about the relationship between a father and daughter cannot avoid comparison with another film on a similar theme, Charlotte Wells’ coming-of-age drama Aftersun. However, despite the fact that both films are mature and considered debuts they work on different emotional registers. Scrapper is an urban fairy tale full of seething teenage energy where the camera jumps around with the unsystematic attention span of a 12-year-old. Charlotte Regan and cinematographer Molly Manning Walker create a sense that the whole world is focused here, not far from an English railroad station, where the girl lives. Regan handles the relationship between Jason and Georgie skilfully, presenting them as mirror images: one is a child who is old before her time and the other is an adult who is only now beginning to grow up. Scrapper is a story about experiencing grief and accepting another person into your life, someone who is able to bring new colors to your world.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
Scrapper
Director Charlotte Regan
UK, 2023, 84 min. 16+