Saoirse Ronan is excellent in the poetic and powerful Orkney-set The Outrun
“There is always low key something”
Could you give up the drink for Paapa Essiedu? I’d like to think we all could but such is the tragedy underpinning The Outrun. Adapted with a gentle reworking by German director Nora Fingscheidt and Amy Liptrot, from Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name, it’s the story of a young woman’s tough journey to self-love and sobriety. Her life in London as a biology post-grad having collapsed in on itself due to her alcohol abuse and her partner Daynin (the aforementioned Essiedu) having given up trying to help her, a stint in rehab is followed by a return to her childhood home in the remote Orkney Islands.
It’s no plain sailing for Saoirse Ronan’s Rona though. Relations with her parents are strained – Dad Andrew (Stephen Dillane) has bipolar disorder and doesn’t deal with it well, Mum Annie (an excellent Saskia Reeves) has long left him and is a born-again Christian which Rona can’t be doing with. As stresses lead to relapse and a new beginning to her new beginning, a volunteer job with the RSPB tracking the rare corncrake offers a glimmer of hope, as does moving away from her folks to the even more remote island of Papay (an island off an island off an island). Life truly stripped back, Rona contemplates what her future might hold.
Fingscheidt uses an non-linear narrative most effectively, frequent flashbacks to Rona’s hedonistic London lifestyle not only give us a picture of what has driven her to this point but also suggest the fractured nature of so many journeys to sobriety. Constant reminders of the past bleed into triggered temptations in the current day and thus we see how much hard work it takes even just to take one day at a time. We see the importance of AA groups and fellow souls to support these journeys, and the quiet triumph that comes in the small choices it takes to stay sober in a society where alcohol is so prevalent in social situations.
Ronan holds so much of the film through her flinty gaze, defiantly looking out whether across sweaty dancefloors or the breaking waves of the wild North Sea but fragile with it too, unable for so long to accept that she’s the problem, suspecting that maybe her mania is linked to her father’s condition. All this focus on Rona means that it is tempting to want to delve more into the relationships in her lives, especially since it would mean more Reeves, Dillane and Essiedu but as she comes to appreciate, The Outrun has to be all about her and in Ronan’s deeply felt performance, it rings painfully true.
