Pickpockets opens with a colour-mixing trick borrowed from a distinguished shelf — Rumble Fish, Pleasantville, Schindler's List — and uses it less rigorously than any of them. In those films the colourised elements carry symbolic weight: innocence, individuality, a world tipping into moral complexity. Here, the logic is loose. Sometimes the highlighted objects are stolen goods; sometimes they're an Australian flag or a train door. It's a gimmick, the film knows it's a gimmick, and it leans into that with enough self-awareness to get away clean. The plot is a classic frenemy structure: amateur pickpocket Robin (Lucy Green) unknowingly steals from the turf of more experienced thief Jesse (DC Fairhurst), triggering a series of double-crosses that end with a jail stint and a stabbing — described here in a register that makes both feel like minor inconveniences. The tone is emphatically light. That is a choice, and a consistent one. This isn't a film trying to be gritty crime drama; it's trying to be a caper, and it succeeds at being exactly that. The mentor dynamic — Robin asking Jesse to teach her the craft, Jesse dispensing wisdom about boring being good and convoluted schemes blowing up in your face — is funny in the specific way that good screwball dialogue is funny: the advice is sound, the film is then going to ignore it. The Lego model used to plan a heist is the most purely delightful single detail here, and it's representative of a filmmaking instinct that keeps reaching for unexpected texture rather than settling for serviceable. Tim Minchin shows up in the second half in what the review rightly calls an against-type performance, and his presence — whatever the role — adds a layer of genuine unpredictability to a film that otherwise telegraphs its affections fairly openly. The will-they-won't-they romantic tension between Jesse and Robin is handled with admirable restraint; it barely registers until it does, which is the right move for a film whose breezy tone can't survive any heavy emotional weather. The screwball DNA is clearly intentional — the film was written as a love letter to the genre — but the dialogue doesn't quite deliver on that ambition. Screwball is a form defined by pace and sting: think Hawks, think early Hepburn, think the rhythm of two people talking slightly faster than is comfortable. Fairhurst and Green have easy chemistry, but the dialogue lacks the tartness the form demands. It's warm where it should be electric. That's a real gap, and the honest thing is to name it. What the film does have is genuine authorial fingerprints. Fairhurst directed and co-edited; both leads co-wrote and co-produced. That level of creative ownership on a small-budget production tends to produce one of two things: a film that feels homemade in the bad sense, or a film that feels exactly like the people who made it wanted it to feel. Pickpockets is firmly the second. It doesn't have the resources to be The Sting or Nine Queens, but it understands what makes those films work — the expectation-subverting final act, the pleasure of retrospective rearrangement — and it reaches for that structure with enough skill to land something satisfying. This is a first feature energy, in the best sense: specific, unashamed of its limitations, genuinely fun. The colour trick is a gimmick, the dialogue doesn't quite crackle, the leads are too clean to be believable pickpockets. None of that matters much. The film is trying to give you a good time, and it does.
