Directed by Nora Fingscheidt | Written by Fingscheidt, Daisy Lewis, and Amy Liptrot, based on the memoir by Liptrot | 118 min | ▲▲▲▲△
This is a loosely fictionalized adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s addiction memoir. It details how she left London following a stint in rehab after her life was dissolved by alcoholism. She went home to the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland, the rocky outcrop where she was brought up. Saoirse Ronan is Amy, renamed here as Rona.
As much as The Outrun is a journey of personal recovery, it’s also about an individual’s interfacing with the sea, the wind, and the sky — and the healing she finds there.
Two aspects lift this character arc from any of the kind I’ve seen — a real imagination in the narrative structure, especially around non-linear chronology, and Ronan herself, who’s required to carry it.
Fingscheidt repeats story beats at different points, fragmenting events into pieces, echoes, shifting in time from London to Scotland and back again, then returning to these moments later to get a more complete picture. We’re in London in the bars and clubs, Rona’s a biologist struggling to hang on to her post-graduate work but she’d rather party with her buds and boyfriend, Daynin (Paapa Essiedu). Then we’re in the Orkneys. Rona’s staying with her born-again mother (Saskia Reeves) and visiting her father (Stephen Dillane), who suffers from a bipolar disorder. Back in London she’s violent when she’s drunk then apologetic when sober, hiding bottles. When we’re on the islands again, Rona’s helping an environmental non-profit, wrestling with loneliness, isolation, regret, and addiction.
Ronan will occasionally narrate archival footage and animation to provide context for the island culture, the way its people and animal life thrive in the unforgiving climate, a foundation for her character’s past and future selves. The film goes as far back as childhood memories, and while it’s sometimes a challenge to place ourselves in the timeline — Rona’s fading blue dye job provides an anchor to the audience through her rehab stretch — the emotional reality of what she’s dealing with is never in doubt.
Ronan’s performance is raw and largely impressive. It surprises me, though, that at 30 — producing this film with her actor husband, Jack Lowden (Slow Horses) — she still comes across as much younger than her years. This should be her first genuine adult dramatic role, sloughing off the glitter of the Hollywood ingenue, but if I didn’t know otherwise I’d figure she was in her early 20s. The scenes of her character’s intense alcoholic jags at times feel petulant more than deranged, but she does a good job of smothering her natural ebullience in the aftermath.
It’s her scenes in the Orkneys that really resonate. The implacable beauty of the locations provide an elemental backdrop to Rona’s gradual transformation and strengthening, and the film’s finale coalesces moments of sheer joy across multiple time periods — it’s a stunner.
