The Outrun is the latest from director Nora Fingscheidt, whose edgy, urgent System Crasher opened doors in 2019 that she largely closed again with her follow-up, 2021’s The Unforgivable, which many critics indeed found unforgivable, even though it starred Sandra Bullock.
She’s on the upswing again here, with the jumbled-up story of a young woman from the Orkneys who goes to London, becomes a terrible alcoholic and then returns to the wild islands off the coast of Scotland to seek balm for the soul and a new start in life.
The arc is not unlike the one for Wild, the brilliant Jean-Marc Vallée film starring Reese Witherspoon as a wild child recapturing her inner joy by walking – literally the road to recovery.
Maybe Fingscheidt has seen that film and decided that, since it’s been done, there’s no real reason to do it again, hence the tangled timelines, the swings of visual and sonic mood as she cuts from puking, shouting London – broken glass, banging tunes, rows with the boyfriend (Paapa Essiedu) – to the windswept emptiness of the Orkney islands, where the recovering Rona gets a job logging sightings of corncrakes for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Maybe, also, Fingscheidt is wary of the misery memoir as a form and mixes it up because stories about alcoholics in recovery are generally a trudge. In case that’s not enough she layers on animated sequences and voiceover background detail of the sort you get in a Bill Bryson book – the amount of energy in a wave, the invention of the Beaufort Scale, the myths and mysteries of the islands. The “nerd layer”, Fingscheidt calls this.
Beneath it all, once you’ve dekinked the chronology and stripped away the various layers, is the same Fingscheidt who so effectively externalised psychological states in System Crasher. Camera movements, the weather, edits, the soundscape and the score are all swung into play as Rona transitions from wild to mild, finally getting a handhold on happiness after joining Alcoholics Anonymous and then getting closer to her goal in an isolated shack on a remote island where the snow comes sideways in the winter and the little woodburner inside can barely cope.
The film is based on the real-life memoir of Amy Liptrot, who co-wrote the screenplay with Fingscheidt, and while it goes into possible causes for Rona’s descent into booze – the bipolar dad, the zealously Christian mum – it also does not spare Rona, the young woman who blames everyone for her condition except herself.
Saoirse Ronan plays Rona, that near-namesakeness suggesting she feels an affinity with the character (she’s also a producer, along with husband Jack Lowden) and she is quite spectacularly good at every aspect of the character of Rona, from being dancing-on-the-tables drunk, to miserable wretchedness lying in bloody broken glass, to edgily contending with her mother and, eventually, inching towards salvation, as the young woman who says at one point, “I can’t be happy sober.”
Stephen Dillane is her dad, Saskia Reeves her mum, neither of them getting in Ronan’s light too much – it’s not their movie. Supporting characters are well cast. I suspect there is local talent in there, playing some of these Orkney characters. They hold their end up too.
There’s probably, for all its many pluses, too much of the drunk stuff in there. Maybe Fingscheidt thought the quiet of Orkney needed the balance, but we have all seen this sort of thing before, even though Ronan has accessed areas we don’t usually see in her performance as Rona.
She’s 30 now, and has already been nominated for an Oscar four times. While she probably won’t win one for The Outrun, her performance here is a great one, and probably better (writing this before the nominations are even out) than the one the eventual winner has already given.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
