Scrapper: a father and daughter prove fun loving criminals in this charming romp

• Reviewed from the 2023 Sundance Film Festival

Writer-director Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper is set and shot in the Limes Farm housing estate in Chigwell, Essex, and centres on 12-year-old Georgie, who has lost her mother to an unnamed illness, and whose father appears to be out of the picture. Such location and story fundamentals might lead viewers to expect a Loachian kitchen-sink drama, especially when the film opens with Georgie hoovering and then trying to steal a bike to the stirring sound of ‘Turn the Page’, one of the Streets’ most urgent working-class anthems. But Regan’s preferred realism is magical rather than social.

Georgie, played with remarkable assurance by newcomer Lola Campbell, is happy to spend her summer mooching around the estate with her pal Ali (another impressive street-cast debutant, Alin Uzun). When social services phone to check in, the wily girl plays audio snippets recorded by a friendly shopkeeper pretending to be her uncle. It’s a mark of her resourcefulness; she also imagines spiders conversing in the style of characters from an ’80s computer game, setting the tone for creative asides throughout, which also include her repeatedly conjuring a mighty tower of scrap (hence the film’s title). She seems to be coping well with the loss of her mother when a young man (Harris Dickinson) leaps over the back fence and strolls into garden with the gait and garb of a burglar, only to introduce himself to her and Ali as Jason, her long-absent father.

The children are initially sceptical of Jason – in one of the film’s lively formal flourishes, Georgie imagines him as a vampire, then a prisoner, then a gangster – and understandably wonder where he has been for years (Spain, apparently). Soon, though, Georgie warms to her father, enlisting him as a sentry when she attempts another bike theft. It turns out that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree: when Jason tries unsuccessfully to pick a lock, it’s clear he’s as inept at crime as his daughter. When the pair run away from police, who’ve spotted them, Georgie loses her phone – which contained precious images of her mother – and, evidently in unresolved grief, beats up another girl while looking for it.

There are echoes of Paper Moon (1973) in the father-daughter criminal partnership and the film’s sheer sense of fun. Scrapper is also reminiscent of Aftersun (2022), especially in scenes where Georgie and her dad adopt silly voices and pretend to be a couple with a failing marriage. This sense of humour and the charm of Georgie’s flights of fantasy elevate this feature debut above many of its peers.