Film review: The Outrun
A windswept island north of Scotland becomes the rugged backdrop for a woman trying to outrun her alcoholic London life, with a remarkable performance from Saoirse Ronan.
The heavy journey from rock-bottom addiction into something approaching normal life is infinitely individual. This memoir of landscape and redemption is based on the real Amy Liptrot, who escaped her alcoholic London life and returned home to the Scottish Orkneys, and from there to Papay, a tiny rugged island on the north-west tip of the archipelago.
Liptrot co-wrote the screenplay for The Outrun, which was produced by Saoirse Ronan and her husband Jack Lowden, with German Nora Fingscheidt directing.
Liptrot’s character in the film is Rona (played by Ronan), and we meet her drunk and obnoxious in a London pub from which she is physically evicted. Rona is not a good drunk; she is wildly enthusiastic and sociable but becomes sloppy and reckless as everyone leaves. Her boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) loves and forgives her until even he has had enough.
This is rock bottom and Rona returns home, which reveals itself as the wellspring of troubles that have skewed her life. Her parents Annie (Saskia Reeves) and Andrew (Stephen Dillane) are loving, but her father has a barely managed bipolar condition and lives in a trailer separate from the main house. Annie has been through so much that she found God, or as she coyly puts it, “God found me”.
In the Orkneys, Rona is a few months into a sobriety countdown when she relapses and the clock starts again. This time, she takes herself to Papay.
Ronan’s blazing performance as the alcoholic Rona holds The Outrun together in the face of much introspection and a fairly common story about the battle to stay off the drink. “I miss it. I miss how good it made me feel,” she says at her AA meeting. Her real fear is that without drink, she will never be happy.
On Papay, where she winters over in Rose Cottage, Rona takes on a volunteer bird-watching job that involves sitting in silence at night listening for the call of the endangered corncrake. She is methodical and industrious, and starts making sketches and taking an interest in the fat tendrils of kelp along the shoreline.
The majestic environment on the island gives the story a wildness, as if the momentous power of waves crashing against a cliff were matching the storms within, and Fingscheidt has cast locals, a nice touch.
There are small signs of progress. Rona at first clamps on headphones and seals herself off from world. Later, she is curious to hear the cawing gulls and the crash of water beating against the rocks. Not much happens day to day.
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At her parents’ place, Rona sat on the beach while others went in the water, but on Papay, on her own, she discovers the brutal exhilaration of wild swimming. She endures frequent incoherent flashbacks that register the chaos of living as a drunk and there are no moments of catharsis, just a gradual shift back towards life.
It is a welcome shift to see Ronan, an actress with a natural sweetness whose parts often reflect that, take on a role that is nasty, messy and sometimes unpleasant. For a highly personal film like this to succeed, we need to invest in an outcome and Ronan makes sure that we do.
The recurring myth of the selkies hints at some kind of metaphor for the shape-shifting recovery that Rona must undergo. The story needed nothing so overt. The sheer drama of the island and its relentless exposure to the wind and sea lends magic to the familiar tale of an addict finding healing in the arms of nature.
The Outrun is showing now as part of the British Film Festival.