Rona (Saoirse Ronan) is drowning. After a decade studying biology in London the 29-year-old returns to her native Orkney with little to show for it but a chronic addiction to alcohol that scuppered her relationship with Daynin (Paapa Essiedu).
During her visit home Rona tries to put on a brave face with her separated parents – her sheep farmer dad (a quietly astonishing Stephen Dillane) who suffers with bipolar disorder, and her strongly Christian mum (Saskia Reeves).
She is unable to tell them she entered rehab back in London and has begun the process of recovery. Something, however, stops her taking the ferry back to the mainland and her life in the city.
Sober, directionless and at a low ebb, she stays on in Orkney. The demons stay on with her too. Memories from her heady nocturnal lifestyle in Hackney flash into view – getting manhandled out of bars, causing scenes in nightclubs, staggering in and out of mishaps and injuries.
Saoirse Ronan in ‘The Outrun’
She distracts herself with farmwork, all the while blaring dance music in her headphones to try and rinse her mind. Focus and structure come with volunteer work monitoring the island’s population of corncrakes. This in turn reconnects her to the lay of the land, opening up its cliffs and coves and hillsides.
The more Rona discovers, the more curiosity she has for the wild rhythms and ancient lore of the islands. The headphones gradually come off as she hands herself over to the wind, the waters, the tiny community of good souls.
Orkney might be light on young people and companionship, but it turns out Rona has stranded herself in the one place that could show her a way out of the darkness.
Lightning struck when Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir, The Outrun, arrived. A sonorous weave of human ache and nature cure, Liptrot’s saga of recovery from alcoholism was critically acclaimed and shifted more than 110,000 copies, thrusting the demure author into the literary spotlight.
For all these things The Outrun is not a book that exactly cries out to be adapted for film. Deep bruises of memory waft in and out as Liptrot charts her return to Orkney and begins to immerse herself in island life. There isn’t really a “plot” to speak of nor big “eureka” moments. If anything, Liptrot’s book was praised for its lack of sentimentality.
Saoirse Ronan, Amy Liptrot and Nora Fingscheidt at the premiere of ‘The Outrun’. Photo: Getty
More generally, books place sensations and mental images near each other and invite the reader to bring some of themselves to the gaps between. The best writers leave such spaces to draw us in this way so that we become involved and therefore invested. Films do something else. They show us what they want us to behold. They use actors and sound design and editing cuts to move us around.
The challenge for director Nora Fingscheidt (adapting alongside Liptrot and Daisy Lewis) was how to bring this literary non-fiction tapestry of memory, pain, and psychogeography into the movie format.
Her solution? Keep it loose, naturalistic, and observational. The Outrun thus has a strong documentary energy about it that speaks to Fingscheidt’s origins in that genre. It is filled with moments where nature and weather conditions have been given the right of way.
An opening scene shows Ronan manhandling a ewe to the ground and getting down and dirty with the job of delivering a lamb, the serious physicality of the task obliterating any chance of choreography. Untrained actors gathered from the locale and scenes shot at Liptrot’s actual farm add to the sense of unrehearsed authenticity.
Flashback scenes of booze hell pierce Rona’s first steps towards rebuilding. We’re hit with a barrage of these snapshots early on and what makes them so disquieting is that their depiction of alcoholism is not one we’re used to. Rona is a young, intelligent girl in the prime of her life. You’re left in no doubt that this is a very real and destructive illness that brings with it a blast radius.
Ronan (who played a significant role in bringing this project to fruition) is formidable for every moment of it; her wattage dialled down, her vulnerability often wordless and her physical graft and grit apparent.
Put your money on a fourth Best Actress nomination. And if, next spring, that golden statue does finally come in for her, there will be a certain poetry in this strange, sensual, and life-affirming film being the one to do it.
Five stars