Addiction can easily feel tired on screen. Its impact may be monstrous but its path is well-known: see for example, the turgid recovery stories portrayed by Denzel Washington in Flight, or Sandra Bullock in 28 Days.
But The Outrun, based on Amy Liptrot’s bestselling 2016 memoir about her own alcoholism and subsequent recovery in beautiful isolation in the Orkney islands, is a vivid, pulsating film that favours texture and olfactory experimentation over plot, as its director and co-writer Nora Fingscheidt tries to give viewers a sense of what addiction feels like.
Saoirse Ronan is Rona, a character based on Liptrot, who grows up on a farm on the main island in Orkney, with English parents. Her sense of always being slightly on the periphery of things is exacerbated by her father’s (Stephen Dillane) bipolar diagnosis and her mother’s (Saskia Reeves) evangelical Christianity.
As soon as Rona gets the chance, she escapes to London, where for a while she has a whale of a time, working as a biologist and partying with her friends and boyfriend (played by Paapa Essiedu). But her drinking slides gradually into dependence.
There are bar fights, physical injuries and near sexual assault. There is the loss of her life as she knows it – an intelligent, once promising young woman reduced to sitting legs akimbo on the pavement, head semi-consciously bowed over a can of beer at dawn, as strangers walk past in disgust. And there is the return to Orkney, tail between her legs, a desire to seek solace in the freezing cold water, the birdsong, the unexpected mysteries of seaweed and Orkney mythology.
We see all this unfold out of sequence, part mystery, part memory, as Rona’s search for renewal on Orkney and then on the tiny island of Papay is plagued by the sporadic recollections of what brought her here. The soundscape vibrates with dance music as Rona delivers a lamb (the camera entirely unflinching). It pulses with the hiss of the waves and the wind. The screen fills with close-ups of sand and seals and the weathered faces of Rona and her parents.
Scenes judder with movement and then stop abruptly, exchanged suddenly for something else, Rona’s changing hair colour the only sign that we have moved time periods. In London it was all pink, then bright blue. As she struggles on Orkney, the blue appears only at her split ends. In a moment of rebirth, euphoric on the beach – has she at last found sobriety? – she will exchange those vestiges of blue for a full head of orange.
The film (co-produced by Ronan’s husband, Slow Horses star Jack Lowden) flails a little in the second half for the same reason that addiction films usually flail: the beats of the recovery journey are predictable – despair, hope, relapse – even if the exact outcome is not.
But Ronan’s performance holds our attention. She is astonishing in this role, able to harness both fragility and determination in equal measure. She dances alone as if exorcising demons from her body, pretends to conduct waves on the beach with unparalleled joy.
Could this be the film Ronan finally wins an Oscar for? (She has been nominated four times, but never yet won.) She would certainly be a worthy winner. Hers is a full-body performance: Rona is as effervescent even in sobriety as the magnificent wilderness she has chosen as her remedy.
