Film Review - The Outrun
Down and out in Orkney and London: Saoirse Ronan stars compelling account of addiction, trauma and gale force winds.
When Amy Liptrot returned home to Orkney, she was hoping to permanently overcome a drinking addiction developed during ten tumultuous years in London. She recorded her experiences in the acclaimed 2016 memoir The Outrun, named after a barren patch of coastal land on her father’s farm. It is part introspective reflection, and part description of Orkney’s nature. Not, you might think, an easy subject to adapt for the screen.
Director Nora Fingscheidt expertly navigates this challenge. While The Outrun’s minimalist plot is certainly light on action, it is, thanks in large part to Saoirse Ronan’s superb performance, an engrossing portrait of dealing with one of life’s toughest challenges.
The film sees Rona (Saoirse Ronan), a 29 year old woman with dyed blue hair, return to Orkney to stay with her family while in recovery. We quickly find out that life on Orkney is by no means straightforward. Rona’s family dynamic is overflowing with tension - her bipolar father (Stephen Dillane) has isolated himself in a caravan, while her evangelical mother (Saskia Reeves) has retreated deeper into her faith in an attempt to find stability and community. As Rona struggles to settle back into Orkney, the story is periodically interrupted by increasingly intense flashbacks of her life in London. There are heated arguments with bartenders, injuries from broken glass and drunken falls, problems at work - all while her relationship with the caring Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) gradually breaks down. These memories push Rona to move further and further north, until she ultimately settles on the island of Papa Westray, population 90.
Telling the story in a non-linear way, jumping between Rona’s London past and Orkney present, is a risk that really pays off. The traumatic London memories not only reveal the extent of the problems that drove Rona back to Orkney, but are a window into her mindset as she grapples with the consequences of her addiction in the present day. A crucial benefit of this structure is that it allows the film to steer well clear of melodrama. We don’t get heartfelt, teary-eyed speeches delivered over a background of tinkly piano music, one of my cinema pet peeves, but instead we re-live the past along with Rona. In fact, the longest monologue in the film is devoted to the untapped benefits of seaweed, a surprisingly fascinating topic.
All of this means that the emotional core of the film is hidden in the everyday. There is a simmering background tension to almost every interaction in the film, as Rona struggles against the pull of old habits. Ronan and director Nora make good use of pauses in several scenes to allow the tension to breathe. There’s an uneasy pause between the fizz of a can opening, and the reveal that it’s just a coke. The camera lingers on the booze shelf when the local shopkeeper says “anything else?”, before Rona shakes her head and leaves. It makes for a portrayal of addiction that feels rooted in realism, as sinister fog forever hanging over one corner of the mind.
There were, however, a couple of times the film missed its mark.
The inclusion of short, documentary-style explanations of folklore, nature or scientific ideas, voiced by Ronan, felt out of place and redundant. Rona’s connection with tradition, science and nature is shown clearly throughout the film - she’s able to help a sheep give birth without stopping to take off her headphones. These addition explanations, presumably taken from Rona’s internal monologue, were unnecessary.
The pacing also felt a little off towards the end of the film. The final act slightly overstays its welcome, adding a couple of extra scenes to a story that seemed to have already reached its conclusion.
With its slow pace, non-linear timeline and sensitive subject matter, The Outrun may not work for everybody, but for those who connect with the characters, it’s a film that will undoubtedly leave a lasting impression.
The Outrun is now showing at the Phoenix Picturehouse, the Curzon and Vue.