Alan in Belfast: Scrapper – joy and grief, resilience and second chances (QFT until Thursday 31 August)

Georgie’s dad disappeared a long time ago and now her Mum has died. But this is a feisty 12-year-old survivor (Lola Campbell) who raises enough money by wheeling and dealing to keep up rent payments and fools the authorities into thinking she’s living with her uncle. Georgie isn’t living in squalor, but death has brought about a loss of innocence. Best mate Ali (Alin Uzun) is her partner in crime. But then her father reappears and her almost Enid Blyton-like existence is disrupted.

Scrapper is Charlotte Regan’s confident – and at times quirky – feature debut. The audience are never asked to feel sorry for Georgie. While the cloud of grief hangs overhead, her attitude is filled with life and resilience. The main action breaks off for stylised inserts which imagine what other children, teachers and social workers might be thinking about Georgie. (Her situation is far-fetched but that won’t spoil the story.) Keys, doors and locks are a recurring theme of the film. There’s also a sense of escapism, of the immaturity of a young mind amid all the adulting she faces.

When Jason (Harris Dickinson) jumps over the back fence and a father figure reenters Georgie’s life, it’s clear he’s the man child and she’s the grown up. His appearance somewhat unsatisfactorily crowds Ali out of the script for much of the second half. Parent and child travel go on a journey – an actual rather than purely metaphorical trip – and Jason slowly melts Georgie’s hardened heart, and she lets him glimpse inside her fertile imagination. The possibility that Jason will once again disappear into the night – Ibiza is his hideaway of choice – looms over the latter stages of the film.

Aftersun and Rocks are two other films which deal well with rekindling a relationship with an estranged parent and the death of a parent respectively. Scrapper could have been a grey, depressed tale of solitude, a foundling abandoned by family. Instead, Regan writes and directs a hope-filled 84-minutes of cinema that opens up the process of grieving by creating a vital character who refuses to be defined by sorrow (or any number of other labels that could be attached to Georgie). Scrapper is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 31 August.