The Outrun (2024 | UK, Germany | 118 minutes | Nora Fingscheidt)
There’s nothing quite like a sobriety memoir to put an actor through their paces and Saoirse Ronan goes on a full marathon as an alcoholic searching for recovery, grace, and little birds in the harsh windswept beauty of the outer Orkney Islands. In Nora Fingscheidt’s adaptation, co-written with Scottish journalist Amy Liptrot (upon whose memoir it’s based), Ronan plays Rona, a biology graduate student who seeks solace while on leave from her studies in London.
There’s a degree to which every alcohol addiction memoir has to hit the same familiar beats, but Fingscheidt’s adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s story fragments the narrative, interleaving the good and terrible times with drinking with the strides and stumbles of righting her life far from civilization. As her story of confronting addiction plays in jarring flashbacks of so many painful regrets, we can can track where we are in arc of her story — from excesses to rock bottom — through Rona’s changing hair colors and surroundings.
When her initial retreat from rehab to her family’s farm — complete with a combative relationship with a religious mother, a tender bond with a father with his own mental health struggles — in her old hometown proves too much to beat temptation, she flees even further. We come to understand that her temptations aren’t simply compensation for the pressures of her studies, the excesses of the city, or issues with her deeply sympathetic boyfriend. She leaves those all behind for a barely-inhabited island (itself an island of an island of an island) with a storm-battered cottage, a finicky internet connection, and a tiny community of inhabitants become a sanctuary for healing.
There we see her reliving her darkest moments while gingerly stitching herself back together through the routine of quiet days spent working on a conservations project. It’s yet-another showcase for Saoirse Ronan, who holds the whole film in the palm of her trembling hands. She conveys what could have been a melodramatic and rote journey to recovery with steeliness and vulnerability. Encompassing the whole scope of addiction and recovery, she captures the complex and ravaging humanity with subtlety in moments both quiet and on the edges of mania and despair. With its craggy beaches, punishing weather, and breathtaking seascapes, the landscape is filmed stunningly and her tour de force performance is epic enough to match.
A previous version of this review ran when The Outrun played as an official selection of the Premieres Program at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.