Review: The Outrun starring Saoirse Ronan finds great beauty in bleak circumstances

Addiction narratives can be bleak, and the waters of the North Atlantic can be bleak, but somehow, together, The Outrun finds great beauty in bleak circumstances. Director Nora Fingscheidt adapts Amy Liptrot’s memoir, The Outrun, with Liptrot co-writing the screenplay.

The film stars Saoirse Ronan as Liptrot’s avatar, Rona. An alcoholic who has lost everything in London, Rona is forced to move home to Scotland’s Orkney Islands after completing a stay in rehab. The Outrun bounces around the timeline, mixing Rona’s recovery with her downward spiral in London and her childhood in Scotland to create a portrait not of addiction as an abstract, but as a tangible experience of dislocation and relocation, physically and emotionally.

Often, the only way to decode where the narrative is in the timeline is by the color of Rona’s dyed hair. Fingscheidt is not terribly interested in linear storytelling or linear recovery. Much as Rona’s sobriety is a process of gaining and backsliding, the film also shifts back and forth. Or you could say it rolls in and out like waves, either way, The Outrun creates a rhythm that less emphasizes knowing exactly where we are in the timeline than understanding the forces that shape Rona, then and now. By the end of the film’s two hours, the effect is hypnotic, much like those waves pounding against the island.

Tasked with anchoring the film, Ronan gives a towering performance, impressive for how immense her presence feels, and how subtle is her actual work. She avoids cliches of the addiction memoir genre, aided by a script that emphasizes interiority over expression. Ronan gets some voiceover to let us into Rona’s thoughts, but even then, her inner monologue is often concerned with trivial facts about the Orkney Islands and nature. Yet Rona is not a mystery to us, we are intimately let into her world through Ronan’s delicate expressions and subtle shifts in her tone. (There is a spot of dialogue dedicated to explaining her mish-mash accent, as she mostly fails to cover her native Irish brogue.) She is ably supported, though, by Saskia Reeves and Stephen Dillane as Rona’s parents, Annie and Andrew, and by Paapa Essiedu as Rona’s London love, Daynin.

The film looks gorgeous (it’s lensed by Yunus Roy Imer), making the most of the windswept setting on the islands, and the seals that pepper the waters off Orkney. Their eerie, wolf-like calls echo through the film’s soundscape, as present as the corncrake’s call is absent. Attempting to rebuild her life, Rona joins an effort to track the bird on the islands, driving around at night, listening for their distinct call, which eludes her. As Rona pursues sobriety, she retreats farther and farther into the fastness of the islands, until she is living in a tiny cottage on a tiny island, and there begins to find herself again. Ronan spends a lot of time alone on screen, and she remains compelling, even if Rona is just doing laundry. So much of Rona’s inner life is in Ronan’s face, it’s impossible to look away from her.

The only gimmicky bit of the film is a recurring drone on the soundtrack, suggestive of the noise of Orkney Island, which is either the waves in caverns under the island, or the wind, or in everyone’s mind, and is here also indicative of Rona’s mental state. The longer she is sober, the less the drone intrudes. It’s a little on the nose for a film that is otherwise more poetic than literal, but since there IS a legend about the strange sound of Orkney Island, it gets a pass.

The Outrun is grounded in the reality of the daily effort to remain sober, but there is a core of hope in the film. Hope that this, too, shall pass, that even if things aren’t perfect and life remains hard, it can also be good. The Outrun is a melancholic affair, but it’s the melancholy of sad poems and lonely beaches. There is value in the world around us, mystery and beauty exist despite our own despair.

The Outrun is now playing exclusively in theaters.