★★★★

A background in rap and grime music videos, made on the cheap in a late noughties Islington, informs Charlotte Regan’s impressive directorial debut. It’s experience that floods a tale of social hyper realism with emotional intelligence and a street smart awareness that stories can find their true awakening through visual expression. Words alone are only one part of the equation. Certainly, there’s extraordinary lyrical beauty behind Scrapper, which is itself defiantly atypical. Having nailed over two hundred shorts across her teens – before graduating to bigger collaborations with Mumford & Sons, Wretch 32 and Stereophonics – Regan is no newcomer. That doesn’t stop her first feature from feeling outrageously assured.

On the matter of precocious talent, Scrapper is headed up by a fiercely vulnerable central performance from newcomer Lola Campbell. She plays twelve-year-old Georgie, a grieving youngster, fending a life alone on the outskirts of London in the wake of her Mum’s recent death. A handwritten tick chart on the wall places Georgie somewhere near the end of Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief. It took Regan three months of tea and improv riffing to coach – or, perhaps, coax – Lola into the role but the effort was worth every bag. It’s a performance that recalls the zany, freewheeling energy once brought to the BBC’s Outnumbered by a young Ramona Marquez but also the offbeat, working class intelligence of Daisy May Cooper. Campbell’s natural flair for comedy reels from a coy but cocksure delivery of finely crafted dialogue – ‘Do you want me to be honest? Or just a little bit of lies?’ – but there’s fear too and a well of hurt.

The film is captured, for the most part, through Georgie’s perspective. This is not a kitchen sink impression of hand to mouth living, as shot through the weary eyes of politicised horror, but a dreamy reminiscence of halcyon youth. An Epping Forest location shoot offers up candy floss housing blocks, all pastel pink, yellow and blue, reminiscent more of seaside holidays than council estate imprisonment. Cinecam square vox pops occasionally interrupt the flow, allowing satellite characters to interject alternate perspectives, but the exaggerated wonderment of Scrapper’s Georgie-eye view is fundamental to its tone, narrative and fridge magnet aesthetic. There’s a leap of logic required to believe a twelve-year-old could really deceive the adult world around her with voice clips and facade but commitment enough to inflict a seed of doubt. It’s a clear signal that sees cinematographer Molly Manning Walker shoot only the social service employees in monochrome.

Into Georgie’s playground adulthood drops Harris Dickinson’s Jason, bleach blonde and a stranger to trousers: ‘What is that hair? He thinks he’s in 8 mile’. It’s a very funny scene that sees Jason hitch himself over the garden fence, while George and best mate Ali (Alin Uzun) play mock shopping channels in the foreground. ‘Who are you?’, demands Georgie. ‘Your dad…owner of that top’ comes the reply. He’s as much a man-child as she is a child-woman.

Dickinson is excellent, typically so. His absentee parent Jason is gentle and endearing, hapless and very slightly awful all in one. Regan’s refusal to gift Jason an easy path to bonding is a credit to the film, which never fails to shirk predicated narrational modelling. There are talking spiders here. Father and daughter alike have their secrets, albeit ones not quite so challenging to guess in advance. Georgie is meticulous in seeking to preserve her home as a museum testament to how it was the day her mother died, as though expecting her return any day. As for Jason, he clings tightly to his phone, listening but never speaking. It is, yet, a poignant mirroring that sees each secret unfurl in isolation. All the more potent as the waves crash down upon each. It’s splendidly done.

T.S.