While sometimes too overreliant on its non-linear storytelling, this serviceable rehabilitation drama boasts stunning scenes of the Orkney Islands, as Saoirse Ronan captures all of the fury and sensitivity of her character trying to liberate herself from alcoholism.
Review #2,879
Dir. Nora Fingscheidt
2024 | UK, Germany | Drama | 118 min | 2.35:1 | English
NC16 (passed clean) for language and brief sexuality.
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Paapa Essiedu, Nabil Elouahabi
Plot: After living life on the edge in London, Rona attempts to come to terms with her troubled past. Hoping to heal, she returns to the wild beauty of Scotland’s Orkney Islands where she grew up.
Awards: Nom. for Panorama Audience Award (Berlinale)
International Sales: Protagonist Pictures
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Alcoholism; Rehabilitation
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Normal
Audience Type: Slightly Mainstream
Viewed: The Projector Golden Mile
Spoilers: No
Saoirse Ronan, one of my all-time screen crushes, alternates between utterly drunk and utterly sober in this new film by Nora Fingscheidt, whose System Crasher (2019) was one of the best films of the year.
The Outrun sees Ronan play Rona, who is in desperate need of personal healing after alcoholism turned her life upside down.
Adapted from the 2015 novel by Amy Liptrot (who also shares a screenwriting credit here with Fingscheidt), The Outrun operates in familiar territory as far as rehabilitation dramas go. There is nothing particularly revelatory about the narrative though it ploughs through the requisite beats without breaking a sweat.
Its non-linear storytelling deceptively paints a more complex picture of Rona’s addiction to alcohol when she led a free-spirited life in London, and her later decision to return to the Orkney Islands (somewhere off Scotland) where she had her childhood, albeit a somewhat tumultuous one.
“I can’t be happy sober.”
Ronan’s performance, capturing all of the fury and sensitivity of her character, may land her another Oscar nomination. She compensates somewhat when the narrative overdoes its alternating between past and present.
But in all honesty, what pulled me through The Outrun were the Orkney sequences. And there is plenty to savour in the cascading waves, flora and fauna, and even the kind and compassionate local community.
The film’s flashy London segments pale in comparison to the ravishing beauty of the natural landscape—but maybe that’s the point, to enter Rona’s stifling headspace as she forces herself to come to terms with her addiction and find a path towards personal liberation.
Fingscheidt best expresses this ‘throbbing’ headspace through a conspicuous emphasis on sound. In The Outrun, sounds are not just amplified—whether natural like the waves crashing onto the shore, or urban like street noises that agitate—but also ‘montaged’ and counterpointed, most sensorially in a scene in the climax that is best described as an invigorating symphony of life’s ebb and flow.
Grade: B
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan 