94 min | NR | February 1, 2021 | Netflix
A teenage girl comes home to an empty flat and a note from her mother. Now she has a little brother to raise and a secret to keep from everyone who could take him away. The miracle is how much life she squeezes in between the panic.
Rocks is Olushola “Rocks” Omotoso, a Black British teenager in East London who comes home one day to find her mother gone and a note left behind. Her mother does not come back. Rocks has a younger brother to feed and a flat to keep and no adult to tell. So she runs the household herself while hiding the truth from the people who would split them up. The film is about the gap between a child and the systems built to help her, and how that gap forces a kid to become an adult before she is ready.
Bukky Bakray plays Rocks with a coiled watchfulness that never tips into self-pity. She tracks every adult in the room for threat. Bakray lets the panic show only in private and snaps the mask back on the second a door opens. Kosar Ali plays Sumaya, the best friend, with a warmth that makes the eventual fracture between them ache. The schoolyard scenes play like documentary, with the girls talking over each other and laughing at jokes the camera never bothers to explain.
Sarah Gavron directs from a script by Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson built out of workshops with the young cast. The handheld camera stays at the girls’ eye level and crowds into the close quarters of phones, bedrooms, and bus seats. The framing treats the teenagers as the center of their own world rather than subjects for an outsider to study. The score stays quiet and lets the soundtrack come from the girls themselves, from the music they play and the voices they raise. Gavron refuses the social-realist habit of grinding her characters down for sympathy.
This is a film that knows its subject from the inside and trusts her completely. It does not lecture about poverty or social services or the children who slip through. It puts you next to Rocks and lets you feel the weight she carries and the joy she steals back in spite of it. The result honors a kid who is failed by adults without ever reducing her to that failure.