Movies

Saoirse Ronan stars in The Outrun
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

The Outrun
Directed by Nora Fingscheidt
Rated R
Recovered 4 October 2024
#TheOutrun

Saoirse Ronan delivers a strong performance that carries The Outrun through familiar territory.

This Is the Day

The Outrun is pretty standard fare when it comes to stories of addiction and rehab.

There are the self-destructive behaviors, the fractured relationships. Challenging home life. Lost jobs. Therapy.

What sets it apart isn’t that the woman contending with the addiction, Rona (Saoirse Ronan, Little Women), is Scottish. Nor is it necessarily that the story takes place in Scotland.

What is unique here is where Rona goes in Scotland. The things she learns, the things she sees and the new relationships she builds. And it’s all based on the true-life memoirs of Amy Liptrot, which won the 2016 Wainwright Prize, honoring the top UK travel and nature writing.

It’s a great start, as Rona sets the stage via a voiceover set against footage of seals out in their natural habitat.

There’s an Orkney legend: people who drown turn into seals and come to shore at night as beautiful naked people. These creatures, called Selkies, must return to the sea at dawn, otherwise, if they’re seen by a human, they’ll be doomed to remain on land and live a life of discontent.

It’s one of many interesting cultural revelations in The Outrun. The problem is these revelations don’t provide a classic movie "payoff." Or, to put it another way, enjoy the lessons and take them for what they are: the lessons and observations of a young woman rehabbing and charting a new course for herself.

Clean and Sober

A lot of the movie feels too academic and that stems from those observations, those educational moments which are, in fairness, interesting enough, but they at times also feel a little forced.

The cultural legends and folklore of the islands are certainly the most colorful. But there’s also farming (sheep, seaweed), biology, ornithology, geography, transportation, satellites, oceanography, meteorology and, of course, addiction.

All of these topics are encountered during Rona’s personal journey, which starts with an assault after a complete stranger picks her up, offering to take her back home after her night of binge drinking and belligerence. Of course, his intentions were hardly pure. The assault finally ushers in a reevaluation of her life. She hurts those she loves, ruins property. Nothing is sacred to her that can’t be found in a bottle.

At least she gets to the point where she can acknowledge that. In an AA meeting, where she admits she misses the booze. Even though she says she misses the way it made her feel, director Nora Fingscheidt (The Unforgivable) smartly contrasts that sentiment with the reality: the assault, her disheveled state, her boyfriend moving out on her.

Rona wants to be locked up for rehab, she knows she needs seclusion. She knows she needs something drastic, something that can overcome the deep-rooted aspects of her life that fueled her addiction to begin with: her bi-polar father, her devout Christian mother, so many influences on those formative years.

And so it is her efforts in rehab to her to those cold, isolated locations on Scotland’s coast.

Scottish Tapestry

In the early scenes, Fingscheidt and cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer (Space Dogs) explore some interesting frame compositions – focusing on lips, half faces – that help keep things visually interesting. Then there’s a curious use of shifting aspect ratios that doesn’t quite make sense, particularly when the stunning, rocky island landscapes would seem to invite as wide a view as possible, rather than locking them into a tighter frame.

Consider it the academics of filmmaking to balance out the academics of the narrative.

It’s a low-energy kind of movie, but that’s also a reflection – or a side effect – of the difficult life it’s documenting. Ultimately, amid all those bars and pubs and narrative sidebars, The Outrun is a journal through a personal geography of the mind and the heart. There’s plenty of introspection – including the observation of Rona grinding her teeth at night – but it’s the introspection that leads to a healthy reinvention.

At one point, Rona finds a fragment of a miniature stature that’s washed ashore. That leads to a collection of interesting (presumably real-life) photos of people holding the treasures they’ve recovered after a gale. That includes a woman, presumably Amy Liptrot, holding that small statue of a torso.

With that, The Outrun completes itself as a cinematic tapestry, a collection of ideas and vignettes that leaves impressions of harsh environments and challenging lives lingering in the mind.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.

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