Rule of thumb: If Saoirse Ronan stars in it, you should probably see it. Such is the case with The Outrun (now on Netflix), director Nora Fingscheidt’s adaptation of the memoir by Amy Liptrot, who chronicled her recovery from alcoholism during a return to her native Orkney Islands. The film holds true to Liptrot’s blend of diary confessions and nature writing by immersing us in the robust and rugged North Atlantic setting, and Ronan gamely loses herself in a character who’s struggling to orient and steady herself amidst both literal and metaphorical gales. Movies-for-adults like The Outrun tend to be overlooked if they don’t get a hearty awards-season push, and that’s why it mostly went unnoticed, but you should do something about that by lending Ronan and Fingscheidt your eyes, ears and heart for a couple hours.
The Gist: “The outrun” refers to an expanse of windswept land in Orkney, an archipelago off the northern coast of Scotland. It’s where Rona (Ronan) was raised, and where she returns to, well, outrun her problems. Not that one can outpace alcoholism – it’s there with you no matter where you are, like your shadow. But Orkney is far enough away from all the London-based triggers where Rona was at her most troubled, the clubs and bars and wee-hours streetlit sidewalks where she drank and stumbled and clashed with her boyfriend, and was assaulted during a most vulnerable moment. The day after the latter occurrence, we see Rona and her angry-swollen eye in closeup as she tells a caseworker that she’s 29 and unemployed; asked if there’s a history of mental illness in her family, she pauses.
And then the narrative jumps, as it so frequently does. Subtitle: 117 days. Rona feeds sheep and helps birth lambs on her father’s Orkney farm. Andrew (Stephen Dillane), her father, tends the animals and land and equipment when he’s not in the manic-depressive throes of his bipolar disorder. Such episodes prompted a divorce, and Rona’s mother, Annie (Saskia Reeves), subsequently threw herself into Christian worship and prayer. In voiceover, Rona shares tidbits of local folklore about massive sea monsters and human-seal hybrids called selkies. She’s the subject of bleary flashbacks of London Rona whooping it up until she’s a wobbly mess, much to the concern of her nice-guy boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), who she verbally abuses. In the present, she sees to her dad, visits uncomfortably with her mother’s prayer group and generally looks lost. Eager to return to London, she boards a ferry, but the bar on board prompts a panic attack and she dashes off the boat.
Rona was a postgrad biologist doing research in London, so she finds a gig with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which involves going out in the wee hours, parking the car and listening for the calls of the elusive corncrake. Hours and days go by without a single buzzy chirp from the animals, so there’s nothing to interrupt the reflective flashbacks to Rona smashing a glass and crawling on hands and knees through the shards and accusing a stressed and harried Daynin of trying to control her, followed by a morning-after apology he’s heard too many times before. In the past and present, she attends meetings and rehab – and relapses. The RSPB sends her to the small isle of Papay, pop. 60, for the winter. Subtitle: 0 days. It’s even colder and more remote in this place, but maybe it’ll put Rona closer to herself.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Ronan also spent a lot of time with the North Atlantic shores (and Kate Winslet!) in Ammonite; cross that with some of the hard-drinking moments of Leaving Las Vegas and depictions of rehab from Trainspotting (although not as extreme).
Performance Worth Watching: Ronan is never, ever less than fully committed here, or in any movie for that matter. Of course she’s good during moments of reflection – her stock in trade in terrific past roles in Brooklyn, Blitz and others – but she gives the moments of extreme drunken loss of control an element of realism and dangerous volatility without ever veering into cartoonishness.
Memorable Dialogue: Rona’s most heartbreaking lament: “I can’t be happy sober.”
Sex and Skin: One brief moment with partial nudity.
Our Take: The Outrun, via Ronan especially, is nothing less than wholly absorbing. That’s no surprise for the four-time Oscar nominee, who meshes nicely with Fingscheidt’s heightened, significantly sensory approach to the material. The filmmaker places careful attention on setting and surroundings, to the point that we’re hypersensitive to any bottle that might appear in the frame – a testament to Ronan’s convincing and empathetic portrayal of an alcoholic. We’re right there with her the entire time.
Fingscheidt interprets the bracing atmosphere of Orkney – filming blurred fact with fiction, taking place on the farm and in the house where Liptrot lived – and its mythological fancifulness as a harsh natural environment ripe for healing; nature is a potent force in Rona’s life, a manifestation of the things one can’t control, as the Alcoholics Anonymous mantra goes. The omnipresent crashing waves and gusty winds swirl effectively in the sound mix, and when Rona wades into the brisk waters, gooseflesh raising on her legs, we can’t help but feel that sobering chill. Contrast that with Fingscheidt’s handheld-camera approach to Rona’s London nightlife, where imagery is warped around the edges of the frame to convey the woozy nausea of overindulgence. Marrying the two aesthetics is the director’s frequent use of near-suffocating closeups, putting the emphasis directly on Ronan, drawing us uncomfortably into her tumultuous personal space.
So where The Outrun is artistically well-considered from a visual standpoint, thematically it’s a touch cluttered, with voiceovers telling tales of sea monsters, and frequent flashbacks that render the narrative patchwork – an apologist might say it mirrors the choppy waters of the North Atlantic, and I might be doing just that. This is an intimate and compelling portrait of a fractured person, and we hope not for a fix, but for Rona to find endurance and peace and the ability to batten down the hatches and weather the temptations that lead to storms; alcoholism is a force of nature for this woman, who’s forever in transition. The film avoids simple definition as comedy or tragedy, and concludes with moments of undeniable poetic elation. It doesn’t shy away from intensely real depictions of addiction, but it also asserts that hope, as ever, endures.
Our Call: Is Ronan’s performance up there with Nicolas Cage’s in Leaving Las Vegas? Believe it. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.