Throughout Nora Fingscheidt’s film The Outrun, we are thoroughly stuck in Rona’s (Saoirse Ronan) head. Fresh out of rehab, Rona has returned to the Orkney Islands, an archipelago off the northern coast of Scotland, where she grew up. No longer living the East London life, she sticks out like a sore thumb with her chemically-dyed aquamarine hair, but she knows the wind-battered Atlantic coast better than most. Harbor seals and sea mist provide some comfort, but her life in recovery is mostly Hell. Rona’s journey, like the film itself, unravels slowly over time, revealing a complicated, sometimes muddled portrait of personal growth that is eventually anchored by nature, community, and Ronan’s throat throbbing performance.
Based on Amy Liprot’s memoir of the same name, The Outrun is sometimes narratively confusing. Led by Rona’s voiceover rather than timestamps or a clearly defined three-act structure, the film fuses together Rona’s everyday life with memories and prose that are lifted straight from Liprot’s personal essays. Archival images of Orkney’s flora and fauna sometimes trigger memories of partying in Hackney, while personal anecdotes about seaside mythology with delightful illustrations lead into AA meetings. Eventually, the film’s cadence makes sense. Rona’s rambling mind never turns off. No wonder she wants a drink. A cocktail or beer alone could soothe, if not stifle, her mind from working at the speed of a mile a minute and help her think straight, but that’s the problem. In the far dregs of Rona’s sober mind, she’s trying to focus on the present, but there are plenty of long-ago memories that creep up unexpectedly during afternoon walks on the beach.
In Orkney, there is almost too much time to think and not enough to do. It’s a quiet place despite the wind. Rona lives with her evangelical Mom (Saskia Reeves) and helps her Dad (Stephan Dillane) with lambing in the spring. Even though they are now somewhat peacefully divorced, both parents leave our protagonist with a clenched jaw — her father struggles with bipolar disorder, and thus oscillates between mania and depression, while her mother’s medicine of choice is Bible study. Triggered by childhood wounds of neglect, which are shown in flashback, Rona occasionally lashes out, coping through music and cigarettes, but most arguments are benign. She stomps around Orkney’s coastline with headphones and a scowl, while the wind, rain, and camera swirl around her, the latter shifting away only to feature sweeping long shots of the Scottish coast. We get to see how small she is in the grand scheme of things, and yet Ronan’s gaze is steely. Everything is internal during these early days in Orkney, so the waves she can’t escape act as an apt, if somewhat cliche, metaphor for her inner turmoil.
Where Orkney reflects the far end of the world, London is its center. Through flashbacks, we can see that Rona was always one of those people who wanted to leave home. London is vibrant, promising, and full of new people including Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), who soon becomes her live-in boyfriend. Initially, Rona’s drinking doesn’t seem that bad, except she has a drink or beer handy in almost every shot. Because time is nonlinear in The Outrun, Rona’s hair and nail color function like a clock. Through various shades of orange and teal with bleached blonde hair mixed in between, we are able to measure the time that Rona is in London. She loses almost everything when her hair is pink or perhaps orange. She fights with Daynin and a group of finance bros at a club, causing a scene that she can’t remember. This behavior eventually leads to a black eye, an empty apartment, and rehab.
Like Rona’s nails and hair, sobriety coins also offer significance. Despite surpassing an impressive 90 days clean, relapsing is never far from Rona’s mind. During one scene on Orkney, we watch Rona mirror one of her Father’s depressive episodes. After dipping her finger in an old glass of wine, Rona gets a few drinks at a pub. Stumbling home, she transforms, and her Mother becomes a target of her wrath. For the longest time, Rona has held her cool. She’s landed a job with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and is seemingly doing better, but in this scene, Rona’s eyes glaze over. The camera zooms out so we can take in the full scope of Ronan’s performance. Her physicality is as mesmerizing as it is shocking. Rona, in her drunken stupor, takes no prisoners, blaming her Mother for her parents’ divorce, getting nastier and nastier with each passing jab, all while her Mother remains silent. Eventually, she passes out. She presumably doesn’t remember anything, but the alienating effects of her blackouts are seismically felt the next day.
Knowing this isn’t a great way to live, Rona ventures further into the Orkney Islands. She takes a job with RSPB preserving corncrakes on the remote island of Papay Westray. Here, totally isolated from the rest of the world, Rona starts anew. She lets her emotions run their course rather than holding them in like hot steam as she did on Orkney. Childish endeavors fill her with real joy, whether it’s spotting seals or harnessing the waves while captaining a make-believe ship. These scenes can feel somewhat embarrassing to watch, almost voyeuristic to a profound intimacy, but they are also completely earnest. For the first time, Rona seems comfortable in her own body without the presence of alcohol; it’s a total release. She makes friends with the locals and discovers new hobbies. In many ways, Rona reclaims the years she lost to addiction. She bakes bread and rapidly, almost manically, expresses the benefits of seaweed cultivation to her Mother, and they swim in the ice cold water together — atonement for past mistakes.
In many ways, The Outrun functions in the way of a spiral. Not everything is entirely parsable in individual moments, but we see that things eventually reach the end they must, and for Rona reflect a change for the better. The film’s abstracted narrative structure means we’re truly locked into Rona’s rambling mind, and though the metaphors that abound are corny — like the corncrakes! — they give Rona a job, a purpose, and also a few laughs. But none of this would have worked with Ronan lending the film its luster. Her transformation into Rona is entire, digging into the best and worst of her, delivering the kind of ego-free performance that obscures the actor’s stardom. In The Outrun, Ronan’s Rona is a scared, flawed, brave, generous person — someone we all probably know.
DIRECTOR: Nora Fingscheidt; CAST: Saoirse Ronan, Saskia Reeves, Stephen Dillane, Paapa Essiedu; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: October 4; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 58 min.
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