Scrapper Review

Scrapper is a British comedy-drama that won the Dramatic Competition of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. It serves a more light-hearted take on the kitchen sink drama.

Georgie (Lola Campbell) is a 12-year-old girl who has been living alone after her mother’s passing. She makes ends meet by stealing bikes and selling them to a local dealer. Her world gets rocked by the appearance of a man she has never met, her father, Jason (Harris Dickinson).

Scrapper bore a few similarities to 2022’s Aftersun. Both films were feature debuts for their directors and young stars. Both films were about a father trying to bond with their daughters. Both films gained a lot of attention after premiering at major festivals and were picked up by major indie distributors. Both girls in the films wore football shirts. There were differences as well since Scrapper was set in England and focused on comedy and drama instead of having an art-house approach.

Kitchen sink realism is a popular subgenre in the UK. Many well-known filmmakers have made films in this genre like Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach, Mike Leach, Lynne Ramsay, and Andrea Arnold. Even the sole directional efforts by Gary Oldman and Tim Roth were kitchen sink dramas. However, this subgenre can be hard to watch because it looks at social subjects like poverty, and domestic abuse. The whole point of the genre is to focus on the lives of working-class people and look at hard-hitting subjects.

Scrapper does have some of the hallmarks of a kitchen sink drama. The film focused on a young character which was similar to films like Kes, Ratcatcher, Fish Tank, The Violators, and Jellyfish. Like those films, Scrapper focuses on the relationship between a young character and someone older, although in Scrapper the relationship was a lot less sinister. There was a question of what Jason’s intentions and motivations were. Georgie looked at Jason’s possessions and his phones and there was the question of where had he been for the past 12 years.

The narrative of Scrapper centred on the father-daughter relationship. The first half of the film was a battle of wits between the pair as Georgie tries to get rid of Jason and Jason needs to thwart her. There was humour like when Jason had to break into the house and end Georgie’s scheme to fool social services, to more serious matters with Jason needing to control and discipline his daughter. The second half was more focused on the pair bonding with Jason telling Georgie what her mother was like, to doing activities like Jason acting as Georgie’s lookout and re-enacting a scene from Manhattan. The second half gave the film a tenderness. Jason needed to learn how to be a father very quickly. I have been impressed by Dickinson’s previous performance and he shows his range by playing a bleach-blonde Cockney who had hard and soft edges.

Lola Campbell did give a terrific performance, especially due to her young age and the material she was given. Georgie had the gift of the gab and acted like a mini Del Boy, whether she was selling her ill-gotten merchandise, convincing potential victims that she was performing ‘bike maintenance,’ or tricking the incompetent social workers. There was emotional weight in Campbell’s performance because Georgie was still processing her grief. Despite Georgie putting on a brave front she was suffering. When Georgie was alone, she watched a video of her mum on her phone and went into her mum’s old room to think. Georgie tried to maintain her mum’s presence by doing things like arranging the pillows on the sofa just like her mum did.

Scrappers’ writer/director, Charlotte Regan aimed to give the film some visual flair. There was an emphasis on colour and bright cinematography which made it stand out from the usual grim and gloomy visuals in kitchen sink dramas. There were some stylish flourishes like the documentary segments where people who know Georgie were interviewed and the weirdest was the 8-bit voice and text for when the spiders spoke.

Scrappers was a solid directional debut from Charlotte Regan who was able to make a humorous yet touching coming-of-age story