The Outrun
German filmmaker Nora Fingscheidt does a fantastic job of bringing Amy Liptrot’s poetic alcohol recovery memoir to the screen, helped in no small part by a transcendent performance by Irish actor Saoirse Ronan
As art forms go, cinema is a pretty good one for depicting inebriation. A little focus pull here, a few elliptical edits and the inevitable fade to black and you’ve a nifty approximation of the woozy hedonism of a night on the lash and the discombobulation of the morning-after hangover. What makes Nora Fingscheidt's lyrical adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir of her battle with alcoholism so winning is that it’s equally at home depicting the angsty boredom of sobriety as it is the chaotic abandonment of a life dependent on alcohol.
The chief weapons in Fingscheidt's arsenal are the wind-blasted landscape of Orkney and the extraordinary central turn by Saoirse Ronan, who’s rarely been better than here playing Rona, the Liptrot surrogate. When we first meet her she’s fresh from rehab and back living on Orkney with her pious mother. She’s meant to be returning to London to finish her biology degree, but she realises that the best chance she has to stay on the wagon is to exile herself from her former life. In jagged flashbacks, shot in cramped, up close compositions, we’re slowly shown what she’s running from – a cycle of reckless benders, broken relationships and booze-inflicted trauma.
The bleak details of Rona’s destructive relationship with drink in London – her inability to call it a night, a habit of hiding bottles around her flat, the blackouts from which she wakes covered in cuts and bruises – are perhaps overfamiliar from other cinematic tales of alcoholism, but the scenes on Orkney are fresher. Rona is at once completely at home here but also all at sea. We see her birthing lambs like a pro on her dad’s farm but then floundering on the high street when she tries to make friends with a random guy her age, with Ronan showing she’s as deft at awkward comedy as she is at high tragedy. Rona becomes more comfortable in her skin as she finds an even more remote island on Orkney to hunker down in, and while her fraught relationships with her bipolar father, her born-again Christian mother and her loving ex-boyfriend are finely sketched, they’re on the periphery. Instead, the film's beating heart is Rona’s seemingly elemental connection with this primordial archipelago adrift from mainland Scotland.
In a dreamy stream-of-consciousness voiceover, Rona recounts bits of Orkney folklore, like the selkies who “slip off their seal skins in the night and come ashore as beautiful people” or the gigantic Stoor Worm, a sea serpent so huge it can wrap its body around the globe. These snippets are often accompanied by surprising archive newsreels and even animated sequences, whimsical touches that there could have been more of. Rona’s fascination with nature and the job she reluctantly takes with the RSPB to document the possibly extinct corncrakes that used to be common on Orkney's islands are also incorporated into the recovery narrative in deeply satisfying ways.
The Outrun offers a truly immersive experience. You stumble out feeling you’ve swum with those curious seals and you’ll swear there's a whiff of brine air and seaweed on your nostrils. It's a film full of bold formal choices and vivid imagery, anchored by a transcendent performance that’s more than deserving of the Oscar speculation it's attracted. Like the winds that batter Orkney, Ronan is a force to be reckoned with.
Released 27 Sep by StudioCanal; certificate 15