Saoirse Ronan stars as a woman from Scotland’s remote Orkney Islands is forced to return home when her alcoholism implodes both her career as a marine biologist and her personal life, in the moving, true story-inspired THE OUTRUN. Based on Amy Liptrot’s bestselling memoir, THE OUTRUN tells the story of 29-year-old Rona’s (Ronan) as her life at college in London transforms from a promising one full of new freedoms, to a spiraling struggle with alcoholism. Forced back home to the Orkney Islands, Rona struggles with new found sobriety and regrets, as she also copes with her separated parents, a bipolar farmer father and a cold, religious mother, plus the social isolation and loneliness of life on a sparsely inhabited, remote island.
Saoirse Ronan gives one of her best performances here, and is on screen, usually alone, most of the time, adding an extra challenge. Ronan takes us through the moving inner journey of her character, both as she battles alcoholism and copes with lost love, but as she discovers a new way of being in the world, a journey of self-discovery that brings connection to both human community and the natural world.
The film is divided into three parts, one being Rona’s life of fun and freedom at college in London, as she studies marine biology at college and embraces the party life with her friends after hours and finds new love with Daynin (Paapa Essiedu). But alcoholism takes over her life and destroys it, sending her to rehab and eventually home to Orkney. In Orkney, Rona struggles with sobriety, with her parents’ problems, and her loneliness, until in a third phase, she finally finds a way back, through connection with the natural world and human community, on a tiny, weather-lashed and very remote island in the Orkneys.
But the film opens at the middle part of this story, with Rona just back home in Orkney, and tells her story in London with flashback scenes, plus a few flashbacks to childhood. The film unspools in a non-linear manner but we are aided by the central character’s vividly dyed hair, which helps us keep track of where we are in time in her story, as the blue color she sports in London grows out and an orange one later takes its place eventually in Orkney. Without that marker, it might be a bit hard to keep track.
Since this is based on a memoir and the author, Amy Liptrot collaborated on the film, director Nora Fingscheidt made the wise decision to change the central character’s name and to fictionalize the story a bit, to make things easier for actor Saoirse Ronan and the writer. The story still remains much the same, as powerful and moving, and unconventional as before, with the power of the natural world to transform her life a central key.
Rona feels out of place back on Orkney and living with her stern mother, while checking on her unstable if loving father. But a pivotal moment come when she takes a job as part of a group of conservationists surveying the island population of a rare endangered but once common bird, a corn crake. At first she carries out her work with indifference but as she scans the horizon and listens for the bird’s unique call, she begins to connect with the natural world around her which she has hardly thought about before.
Shooting on location was essential. The film’s photography is stunning, and the screening is frequently filled with breathtaking, wild seaside scenery or windswept views of the scenic, remote Orkney Islands. The islands’ wild beauty and unforgiving weather are almost a character in the film, and connecting with that natural world is key to Rona’s recovery. The sea surrounding everything is both breathtakingly beautiful and harshly unforgiving. Having grown up there, Rona has become so accustomed to the natural world around her that it is nearly invisible, and real change only comes when she becomes deeply aware of both sides of that terrible beauty, its invigorating energy and the danger to the unprepared.
THE OUTRUN opens Friday, Oct. 4, 2024 in theaters.
RATING: 3.5 out of 4 stars
