Rocks (2019)
Rocks arrived in 2019 as one of the more quietly assured British films of that year, opening at the Toronto International Film Festival before a theatrical release that earned it six BAFTA nominations, including Outstanding British Film. It is the kind of film that slips out without fanfare and then refuses to leave your head. The premise is bracingly simple: a fifteen-year-old girl named Rocks, living in East London, is left to fend for herself and her young brother Emmanuel after their mother disappears. What follows over those ninety-four minutes is less a plot-driven thriller about the care system and more a portrait of friendship, loyalty, and the particular exhaustion of having to be an adult before you are ready for it.
The film was directed by Sarah Gavron, whose previous feature Suffragette (2015) worked on a larger canvas with a period setting and a recognisable ensemble. Rocks is a deliberate step in a different direction: smaller, looser, anchored in the present-day texture of a specific London community. The script was written by Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson, who drew heavily on workshops and conversations with young women from the area, giving the dialogue a grain of authenticity that you cannot fake. The production was supported by Film4 and Fable Pictures, among others, and made on a modest budget that suits the material, keeping everything close to the ground. It shares something of its DNA with The Florida Project, Sean Baker's 2017 film about a child living at the margins of adult crisis, though Gavron's film is rooted firmly in British social realism rather than Baker's sun-saturated American surrealism.
The cast is led by Bukky Bakray in the title role, a performer with no significant screen credits before this, and the discovery of her is one of the film's genuine pleasures. Kosar Ali plays Sumaya, Rocks's best friend, and the two share an easy, combative warmth that gives the film its emotional centre. D'Angelou Osei-Kissiedu plays Emmanuel, Rocks's younger brother, with a natural, unguarded quality. Shaneigha-Monik Greyson and Ruby Stokes round out a supporting cast that was, like Bakray and Ali, largely made up of young women without professional acting backgrounds. Gavron worked extensively with the cast before shooting, and it shows. There is something in the way these performers move through scenes together, the overlapping conversations, the physical ease, that makes you feel you are watching friends rather than actors. For a companion piece in tone, if not in subject, you might think of Ghost World, another film that is fundamentally about female friendship weathering the pressure of growing up, even if its suburban American register is a world away from Hackney.
Cinematographer Hélène Louvart, who has worked with Agnes Varda and Eliza Hittman among others, shoots Rocks with a handheld immediacy that never tips into self-conscious shakiness. There is warmth in the images even when the circumstances are difficult: busy high streets, cramped flats, school corridors flooded with afternoon light. The camera stays close to faces, patient with small expressions. Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch composed the score, which runs mostly under the surface of scenes rather than over them, string-forward and restrained, leaving space for the ambient noise of the city and the natural sound of the performances. Editor Maya Maffioli cuts with a rhythm that matches the film's tonal shifts, moving between moments of genuine distress and bursts of laughter without either feeling like a gear-change. The overall look and sound is polished but unshowy, in service of the material rather than calling attention to itself. The question of how well all that craft coheres is, of course, what the review below is for.
Rocks belongs to a genre British cinema does as well as anyone: the hard, tender story of a child slipping through the cracks of a system meant to catch them. Here that child is Rocks, fifteen years old, suddenly left to raise herself and her younger brother after their mother abandons them without warning. The spine of the film is her scramble to keep the two of them together and out of the care system, all while doing the ordinary, impossible work of growing up, falling out with friends, and finding her feet in London.
What lifts it above misery for its own sake is how well it balances the light and the dark. It is tragic and heartbreaking in places, as that premise demands, but it is also, often, funny and warm and uplifting, alive to the small joys and daft moments that carry kids like Rocks through. That tonal range is harder to pull off than it looks, and the film mostly manages it, never tipping into either bleakness or sentimentality for long.
It sits comfortably alongside the likes of Scrapper and Fish Tank, films it resembles in a lot of ways, and if it does not quite have the singular punch of either, it earns its place in that company. A big part of why is the cast. These are young, largely untried performers, and they are good more or less across the board, natural and unforced in a way that makes the whole thing feel observed rather than staged.
If I have a reservation, it is that Rocks does not bring a great deal that is new to what is, by now, a well-stocked shelf of films like this. The beats are familiar, the territory thoroughly mapped. But familiar is not the same as tired, and it tells its story with enough heart, humour and honesty to stand on its own two feet. Three and a half stars, a moving, warm-hearted and beautifully played drama that does a well-worn thing and does it well.
Rocks sits within a well-established tradition of British social realist cinema, one that stretches from the kitchen-sink dramas of the sixties to contemporary work that continues to find new voices and new communities worth looking at. Films like Half Nelson or, further back, Oliver! remind us that stories of children in precarious circumstances have always found an audience, because they tap into something that does not date. What Rocks does is bring that concern to a specific, contemporary, multiracial London that British cinema had not always been quick to represent. Whether that is enough to make it essential, or whether it is a very good film doing a familiar thing, is a genuinely open question. What is harder to argue with is the feeling it leaves behind: of a community seen clearly, and a young performer at the start of what may turn out to be quite a career.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2026-10-13
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Rocks (2019) on YouTube
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