Charlotte Regan makes films about working-class children who refuse to be pitied, shot in colour where most British films of this kind reach for grey. One feature is not a career, but Scrapper is a good enough start that we want the second.
Fi1m perspective
A twelve-year-old girl stands in the doorway of an east London council house, arms folded, and tells a social worker that her uncle is looking after her. The uncle's name is Winston Churchill. She does not blink. That is Charlotte Regan's cinema in one shot: a child who has decided she needs nobody, a joke told with a straight face, and a setting that would be miserable in almost anyone else's hands and is not in hers.
Regan came up fast and cheap. She was directing music videos at fifteen and had made more than two hundred low-budget promos by the time she left Ravensbourne in 2016. Her first short, Standby (2016), got her noticed. Scrapper (2023), developed with iFeatures and the BFI, was the feature that followed, and around it she has directed episodes of The Responder (2022) and The Buccaneers (2023) and is writing a series, Mint. We rated The Responder highly, but the credit in our review goes to Tony Schumacher and Martin Freeman rather than to any one director, and we will not pretend otherwise.
So the case rests on Scrapper, and it is a decent case. Regan has said that "a lot of working-class cinema is so joyless," and the film is her answer: 84 minutes, bright, quick, with Molly Manning Walker shooting the estate in colour rather than the standard drizzle and Elena Muntoni dressing a council house as somewhere a child might actually want to live. Regan gets a first performance out of Lola Campbell that looks like a fifth, and she gets Harris Dickinson to play a grown man being told off by a child without once reaching for our sympathy. We laughed at the Winston Churchill line more than we had any right to, because Campbell delivers it as a fact and Regan cuts away before anyone can react.
What does not work yet is the whimsy when it is doing the story's job for it. The talking neighbours are funny once and then look like a director who does not trust a scene to stand on its own, and around the middle the film runs short of things for father and daughter to do and sends them off to be quirky instead. Regan is also kinder to Jason than we might have been, which fits a film told from a child's height but leaves the ending lighter than the material underneath it.
None of that is fatal in a first feature. The question is whether the colour and the jokes are how Regan sees the world or a way of not looking at the hard parts of it. Scrapper suggests the former, mostly. The second film will tell us, and we will be there for it.
Biography
Charlotte Regan is a British film director and screenwriter. She was born on 19 June 1994 in London and graduated from Ravensbourne University London with a BA in Digital Film Production in 2016.
She began directing music videos at the age of 15 and has directed more than 200. Her early short films include Standby (2016), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and received a BAFTA nomination, as well as Fry-Up (2017) and Dodgy Dave (2018).
Regan wrote and directed her debut feature Scrapper (2023), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. She has also directed episodes of the television series The Buccaneers (2023) and The Responder (2022).
