Everyone loves a good father-daughter bonding story, especially if the father and the daughter are quirky individuals with a penchant for mischief. If that’s your thing, then you will most likely enjoy director Charlotte Regan’s latest film Scrapper about a young girl named Georgie (Lola Campbell) and her estranged father (Harris Dickinson).
After Georgie’s mother dies, the 12-year-old continues to live on her own, evading the suspicions of social services by fabricating a fake uncle and paying her bills by selling stolen bikes. She plots her way through the stages of grief, crossing them off a list she keeps taped to the fridge, and she approaches the world with a staunch gravitas that ensures her ability to thrive without a legal guardian. When her estranged father quite literally appears in her life one afternoon, Georgie must decide whether to embrace his newfound desire to be a parent or navigate her grief all on her own.
Scrapper has all the delightful makings of a sweet, tenderly crafted drama about love and loss. Campbell is charming as Georgie, bringing a serious energy to her role as the scrappy little girl that makes even the harshest of critics root for her. However, the story’s attempts at sentimentality always feel slightly unrealized leaving Georgie’s grief to float in space completely untethered to anything concrete. This is perhaps most evident in the form of a secret room (which is presumably her mother’s) that Georgie keeps locked at all times with a tiny, plastic diary lock (a lovely detail). Occasionally she will sneak away into the room to be alone with her sorrow, but the room and its contents never quite feel realized enough to be emotionally compelling. Instead, Regan wants her audience to buy into the “grief locked away behind closed doors” idea simply because it is endearing and vaguely eccentric, but in reality, it comes off as amateurish on screen.
This lack of compelling evidence for why the characters do the things they do is a reoccurring problem with Scrapper. Audiences are asked to fill in too many holes with generic or obvious information so that outside of the basic father-daughter story, the film never really produces anything unique or interesting. There’s also a tonal dissonance perpetrated by the use of short video footage meant to look like recorded video that, while operating with the best intentions, only muddies up the story. If these asides are meant to provide background on Georgie’s world, they only distract from the more interesting story at hand.
Overall, Scrapper is surface-level heartwarming. It’s easily watchable and some viewers may find something to love here. But in terms of adding to the cultural conversations about grief and what it means to be a parent, unfortunately, this film would have been better off scrapped into the bin.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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