The Outrun (15)

London party girl Rona crashes and burns in an alcohol-fuelled stupor and is forced to go into rehab to confront her demons. A few weeks into her sobriety, she travels back to the Orkney Islands where she grew up to experience single life stripped bare of home comforts. The experience encourages Rona to come to terms with her troubled past and reconnect with her parents.

LondonNet Film Review

The Outrun (15) Film Review from LondonNet

In the unflinching 2015 memoir The Outrun, about her recovery from addiction on her childhood home of the Orkney Islands, off the north-eastern coast of Scotland, Amy Liptrot draws parallels between the rugged and unforgiving Orcadian landscape and her rehabilitation. In one section, she likens herself to a jellyfish stranded on rocks at the mercy of the unrelenting elements. “I was washed up: no longer buoyant, battered and storm-tossed,” she poetically relates. Director Nora Fingscheidt’s austere dramatisation of Liptrot’s work, co-written by the German filmmaker and the Scottish author, was filmed on location in Orkney and treats the islands as a silent yet powerful supporting cast member…

Cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer captures dramatic topography where sheep outnumber people to completely immerse us in 5,000 years of history dating back to the Neolithic period, cloaked in folklore and superstition. You can almost feel salt spray spatter off the screen as waves crash angrily against sentry-like cliffs and whipcracks of freezing air send shivers through expanses of wild grass. This vibrant backdrop frames a formidable central performance from Saoirse Ronan as Liptrot’s fictionalised alter ego. “I can’t be happy sober,” she laments after she hits rock bottom and rediscovers tattered shreds of herself on the 12-step programme.

Free-spirit Rona (Ronan) is clinging on to her late 20s with grim determination. She continues her biology studies in London where the siren song of late-night drinks and revelry with concerned boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) invariably end in alcohol-fuelled rage, embarrassment and aching regret. Rona’s self-destructive behaviour sounds a death knell for the relationship and she wearily enters rehab to face her demons.

She celebrates 117 days sober by returning home to Orkney to take a solitary job monitoring the local population of endangered corncrakes on behalf of an ornithological preservation society. Rona wages daily battles with addiction, attends a local support group and risks opening old wounds by reconnecting with her deeply religious mother Annie (Saskia Reeves) and bipolar father Andrew (Stephen Dillane). Far from the temptations of London, Rona sombrely accepts that she may not leave the wind-battered archipelago the same way that she arrived, by boat: “If you go mad in Orkney, they just fly you out…”

The Outrun is dominated by Ronan’s no-holds-barred portrayal of a young woman choking and spluttering in the vice-like grip of alcohol dependency. Her screams of anguish compete with the roars of untameable Mother Nature on Orkney and we root for small victories in a lifelong battle. Joy is fleeting in Fingscheidt’s grimly compelling picture and the two-hour running time does not pass by quickly as cycles of misery and intoxicated oblivion repeat.

– Sarah Lee