Words by JANE CROWTHER
‘Britain is an island off Europe, Orkney is an island off Britain, Westray is an island off Orkney, Papay is an island off Westray…’ says Rona of the remote place she returns to in pursuit of rehabilitation in Nora Fingscheidt’s gorgeous, wild and meditative adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 addiction memoir. The Orkney-bred daughter of English parents (Stephen Dillane and Saskia Reeves), Rona has escaped the far-flung rock of her birth to Hackney for a biology degree and bacchanalian partying – which has tipped from hedonism to fiending. Booze has loosened her and allowed for city adventures and a romance with a doe-eyed boyfriend Paapa Essiedu, but it has also tightened its grip around her, making her a mean drunk as well as the victim of blackouts and violence at the hands of strangers. In Fingscheidt’s time-hopping poem to the forces of nature, the determination of survivors and the beauty of myth, Saoirse Ronan delivers a career-best performance that is unvarnished, brutal and, ultimately, beautiful and life-affirming.
Orkney and tiny island, Papay, are showcased to their full craggy, unforgiving majesty as Rona returns home from London, hoping that escape from the trigger will help her recovery. In flashbacks we unpick the moments that have led to this reckoning on the windswept ‘outrun’ of her father’s sheep farm. The slurred self-harm, the endangerment, the abuse of friends’ goodwill, the shame of nipping at hidden bottles of vodka in the bathroom with the tap on. Rona also narrates key memories and Orkney myths of monsters that have formed her. As she helps birth lambs, struggles to befriend other young people and spits vitriol at her religious mum, she also recalls the mental health episodes of her father and the estrangement from the boy she loved. Like the endangered Corncrake birds she attempts to track for the RSPB, her sobriety is an elusive, fragile thing and her path to the discovery of both turns out to be surprising.
Adapted by Fingscheidt and Liptrot, The Outrun is a bewitching celebration of healing with different timelines deftly denoted by Ronan’s dyed hair and bolstered by moments of stop-motion, still photography and nature footage (curious seals, boiling seas, raging storms). When lensing Rona’s drunken walks home, Fingscheidt employs woozy, disorientating focus to put us right inside the bottle with her, while at other times the camera is a serene watcher as Rona takes a wild swim in a briny bay. Equally multi-discipline is Ronan, toggling from utterly convincing messy drunk to shattered alcoholic, lost recoverer to flame-haired ‘selkie’ at one with the landscape. Her interior life is so easily read, whether it’s the way she lies to her professor, the apology she weepingly offers her mum or the way a tear of wonder slides from her eye as she watches the twinkle of the international space station pass across the Scottish heavens. The experience of watching her within this maelstrom of a movie is a visceral one, and should power her into the awards ring. A kind and essential movie for anyone trying to find the contours of their true self in a time of difficulty.
Words by JANE CROWTHER
The Outrun is in cinemas now
