The Outrun (2024) - Saoirse Ronan navigates between chaos and calm in tempestuous recovery tale

                                                                                                        Credit: allocine.fr

Everything feels painfully real in Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun, a tale of loss and recovery in which Saoirse Ronan stuns as Rona, a woman grappling with alcoholism. Caught somewhere between fiction and documentary, it is a mismatch of the past and the present, of nightlife and nature, and of the desire for a drink and the even stronger one of turning it down.

Ronan plays a semi-fictitious stand-in for Amy Liptrot, on whose memoir the film is based, as she returns to Orkney, an archipelago in Scotland where she grew up. Starting with a job with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and tasked with searching for the rare corn crake, listening for its call across the land, Rona attempts to reconnect with herself and, almost by extension, with the wilderness of Orkney. Yunus Roy Imer’s cinematography is one of a kind, capturing a mixture of scenic Scottish landscapes and fantastical underwater sequences with both tranquillity and aggression. The binaries of nature, and their metaphorical value, are certainly at play here, though it is never overly obvious or unimaginative – the waves come in and out much like the ups and downs of Rona’s life (told largely here through flashbacks to a deeply troubling past). At times, Fingscheidt tips over into the slightly drab, a melancholic voiceover (Ronan) recounting forgotten Scottish folklore, accompanied occasionally by animation. Though it does not destabilise the narrative’s rhythm, it certainly draws away from the far more interesting reality of Rona’s day to day, in particular the loneliness addiction can bring. In an especially tough scene, Rona anxiously asks for a lighter from a stranger outside of a café, forcing conversation despite the young man’s gentle protestations that his friends are waiting for him. It is a simple scene with a lot of weight, perhaps more so even than Rona’s AA meetings with a group of middle-aged men, who take her in their stride despite an evident disparity in age and background. The loneliness of the solitary child is similarly crippling, a father with severe bipolar disorder and a mother who has found God and confides in her fellow religious friends about her daughter’s ‘struggles back in London’. Yet, some of The Outrun’s loveliest scenes are, rather paradoxically, also the ones in which Rona finds herself alone in a small cabin she has rented on the remote Papa Westray island, cooking herself up a storm on Christmas Day, researching algae, recording the sound of the wind and rain from her window – she dances, she rests, she walks, she swims, and she learns to breathe again, all of her own accord.

The Outrun is certainly about finding peace, but it is never made easy – even at the best of times, Rona is attracted and swayed by the promise alcohol has to make her feel good, to bring the beat back to her heart in time to the deafening music of the club where she first met Daynin (a tender performance from Paapa Essiedu), kind-hearted, gentle and caught up in the web of Rona’s addiction. It is here that we see its extent – a bottle of liquor, wrapped in cloth and hidden behind the bathroom sink, speedily chugged, a finger dipped into an abandoned glass of wine and sucked longingly. Rona is someone who feels things, intensely, who keeps emotions stored up in her body, waiting to be released. In many ways, Rona is, herself, Orkney, as much a researcher of its flora and fauna as she is a part of its very topology – it’s why the transition from the beat of a club to the roaring sound of wind and rain on the cliffs of Orkney is so effective, and so difficult to distinguish.