Everything that 12-year-old Georgie (impressive newcomer Lola Campbell) knows about family, she learned from her single mother. And that includes the knack of filling the space left by an absent parent. While her mother was alive, she was both mum and dad to her daughter. Now that she has died, Georgie has taken on the responsibility of parenting herself. Resourcefully pulling the wool over the eyes of social services with an invented uncle as a guardian, Georgie continues to live alone in the home she shared with her mum. She has a best friend, Ali (Alin Uzun); an income (earned through bike theft); and an idiosyncratic, fiercely guarded process of grieving. There’s one thing she doesn’t need in her life: the arrival of her overgrown kid of a father, Jason (Harris Dickinson). Strangers, Georgie and Jason warily eye each other, unwitting mirror images with their clenched lips, hunched shoulders and punchy truculence.
The feature debut from 29-year-old Londoner Charlotte Regan, Scrapper brims with sugar-fuelled youthful energy and an itchy, endless scroll of ideas. Taking a cue from Georgie’s co-dependent relationship with her phone, Regan employs jump cuts and a skittish camera (the film is deftly shot by Molly Manning Walker, whose own directorial debut, How to Have Sex, is out later this year). The colour palette – tangerine, mint green and milkshake pink – seems to have been inspired by a packet of Refreshers sweets. Video game speech bubbles pop up on screen from a Greek chorus of onlooking spiders. Not everything works: statements to camera from teachers, neighbours and social workers land heavily. But mostly Regan’s unfiltered approach brings a fizzing unpredictability and vitality to this abrasively empathic exploration of a father-daughter bond.