Scrapper (2023)
British cinema has a long habit of finding grace in the unglamorous corners of its own cities, and Scrapper (2023) fits squarely into that tradition. Writer-director Charlotte Regan sets her debut feature in a working-class London suburb, following twelve-year-old Georgie, who has been living alone in her flat since her mother's death, keeping social workers at bay with a invented uncle and funding her independence by nicking bikes with her best friend Ali. It is a premise that sounds relentlessly grim on paper, but Regan, working from her own original screenplay, pitches the film somewhere between kitchen-sink realism and something altogether more playful, borrowing a few formal tricks (direct-to-camera address, insect-eye cutaways, the occasional fantastical tangent) to keep the tone from curdling into misery. The film runs a brisk 84 minutes, which turns out to be exactly the right length for the story it has to tell.
Regan came to the feature via short films and music videos, and Scrapper arrived with the kind of momentum that debut films only rarely manage: a BAFTA win for Outstanding British Film and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2023, which immediately marked Regan as a filmmaker worth paying close attention to. The production was backed by a characteristically British coalition of DMC Film, BFI, BBC Film and Great Point Media, the sort of funding arrangement that keeps films like this alive but rarely guarantees a wide theatrical footprint. That it found an audience at all is partly down to word of mouth from the festival circuit. For a companion piece on the kind of formally inventive, low-budget British work that struggles and succeeds at the same time, see also Child, which covers similar emotional territory from a different angle.
At the centre of it all is Lola Campbell as Georgie, a performance of considerable poise from a young actor with no significant screen credits before this. Campbell carries almost every scene, often opposite Alin Uzun as Ali, her bike-thieving accomplice and only real confidant. When Harris Dickinson arrives as Jason, the estranged father who turns up without warning or obvious plan, the film shifts register. Dickinson, who has been quietly building one of the more interesting careers in British acting over the past few years, plays Jason as someone constitutionally ill-equipped for the role he has suddenly decided to audition for. The dynamic between him and Campbell gives the film its emotional weight. Laura Aikman and Ambreen Razia fill out the supporting cast in roles that orbit Georgie's world without overwhelming it. I wrote about Dickinson in The Iron Claw, where he demonstrated much the same quality he brings here: a certain rawness that never tips into self-conscious actorly suffering.
Cinematographer Molly Manning Walker, herself a director of some note, shoots the film with a warmth that never feels false to its environment. The imagery is close and hand-held in the manner of the best social-realist British work, but there is colour here, actual vivid colour, in the housing estate's painted doors and the children's clothing, that gives Georgie's world a texture quite different from the grey palette the genre sometimes defaults to. Manning Walker and Regan share a sensitivity to how people occupy small domestic spaces, and that attentiveness pays off throughout. Patrick Jonsson's score threads between the scenes with a lightness of touch that underlines without insisting, avoiding the orchestral swell that lesser films would reach for at every emotional beat. The editing, handled by Matteo Bini and Billy Sneddon, keeps the pace nimble and allows the film's stranger, more playful sequences to breathe without derailing the quieter scenes built around performance.
Scrapper takes a premise that ought to be crushing, a twelve-year-old girl left on her own after her mum dies, slipped through the cracks of social services and fending for herself, and somehow spins it into something warm, funny and heartbreaking all at once.
Georgie gets by stealing bikes with her closest and only friend, Ali, playing at being fine, until her estranged father Jason turns up from nowhere and upends the careful world she has built for herself.
It sits squarely in a tradition of British social realism I have a lot of time for. It reminded me so strongly of Andrea Arnold, of Fish Tank and her short Wasp, that I actually paused it to check she had not directed this one too. Charlotte Regan, making her debut, has that same unsentimental tenderness for people the movies tend to overlook, though she plays it warmer and more playful than Arnold ever does. Harris Dickinson, whom I have liked in everything I have seen him in, is excellent as Jason, a man plainly out of his depth as a father, and the slow, prickly thaw between him and Georgie is the beating heart of the film.
What I loved most is that it does not cheat. There is no tidy rescue and no neat bow; the ending is not really a happy one, and yet it hands Georgie something she badly needs, which feels far truer than any fairy-tale fix would have. It is a small film, tender and sad and funny by turns, and it left a lump in my throat. Three and a half stars, a lovely, humane debut, and proof that Charlotte Regan is a name to watch.
Scrapper is the kind of small, precise British film that does not announce itself loudly but tends to stay with you. It sits in a lineage that runs from Ken Loach through Andrea Arnold, reaching for the same unsentimental sympathy for people the wider culture tends to overlook, though Regan adds a lightness of her own that sets her apart from both. For anyone interested in how the social-realist mode can be refreshed without abandoning what makes it honest, I also covered The Woman Who Ran, a film equally interested in the smaller, quieter textures of lives being quietly negotiated. Scrapper is polished but unassuming, funny but never evasive about the sadness underneath. Charlotte Regan arrives fully formed, which is both a pleasure and, frankly, a little bit annoying.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2026-09-19
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Scrapper (2023) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Sky Store · Curzon Home Cinema
Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Kino Film Collection
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
