The Outrun: Orkney Landscape Underscores the Power of Setting, Fellowship in Addiction Recovery Tale

By Liz Braun

Rating: A

The Outrun is a drama about a young woman’s struggle with alcoholism. Based on the 2016 memoir by Amy Liptrot, the film stars Saoirse Ronan as Rona, a postgrad biology student of 29 whose love affair with alcohol is the centre of her life, and its ruin.

It’s not accurate to say the film stars Saoirse Ronan. Saoirse Ronan is the movie, the luminous north star of every scene.

We meet Rona at night in a pub as she happily drains strangers’ glasses of alcohol remnants at closing time. She’s dead drunk and is eventually tossed out onto the street. Rona is drunk enough to accept a ride with a stranger, believing she’s getting a lift to the home of her long-suffering boyfriend (Paapa Essiedu).

We see her next in a doctor’s office, answering questions about getting into rehab.

From there, the story moves to Orkney, where Rona grew up. She has returned home and is staying with her religious mother (Saskia Reeves) as she recovers. She helps her father (Stephen Dillane) with the sheep on the family farm and slowly falls into the rhythm of the remote island setting.

For all the peace and beauty there, the wildness of the wind and sea mirror her ongoing struggle.

The Outrun moves around in time, sometimes flashing back to Rona’s life in London— with intense scenes of drunk partying and bad consequences — and then settling back into the isolation of the Orkneys.

At her mother’s suggestion, Rona takes a job with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and is involved in a census of the elusive Corncrake. She drives around at night hoping to hear the bird’s call; in the daytime she meets with farmers and asks if they will alter their haying methods to spare the birds’ habitats.

These are mesmerizing scenes of nature and solitude, and director Nora Fingscheidt, who wrote the screenplay with Liptrot, has included nonprofessional locals in some of these segments.

In contrast, one of the things Rona must process in all this is her father’s mental illness and how it has affected her. He is bipolar; one heartrending re-creation shows him being airlifted out of Orkney after he’s had a breakdown on the day Rona is born.

There are several flashbacks to her childhood, some showing her father in bed, depressed, his face turned to the wall, others with him in full manic mode. In one snippet of her memory, he smashes a window in the house during a gale to welcome in the full force of the wind. Told from a child’s point of view, these scenes are particularly distressing.

Eventually, Rona has to travel farther away, physically, in the hope of staying one step ahead of the devil. She moves to Papay, an even more remote island in the Orkneys, and starts her journey toward sobriety once again.

The Outrun is a tale of addiction but also a powerful character study, perfectly brought to life by an understated performance from Ronan.

The Outrun. Directed by Nora Fingscheidt, written by Nora Fingscheidt and Amy Liptrot. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Saskia Reeves, and Stephen Dillane. In theatres October 4.