The Outrun: Film Review
Saoirse Ronan is coming for her next Oscar nomination with her tremendous performance in The Outrun.
In the movie adaptation of Amy Liptrot‘s 2016 memoir of the same name, Ronan plays Rona, a young woman who returns home to the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland to try and get sober after losing her career prospects, home and boyfriend due to her alcohol addiction.
First and foremost, The Outrun is a stunning showcase for Ronan. The 30-year-old already has four Oscar nominations to her name and she is surely going to receive a fourth for her fully committed and quietly powerful portrayal of a woman trying to rebuild the life she destroyed through alcoholism. The narrative flashes back and forth between her recovery at home and her destructive days in London so we get to see a wide range of what she can do. We see Rona as a violent drunken monster, someone full of shame and regret, and an addict struggling to overcome her urge to drink and remember the joys of life.
My biggest issue with The Outrun, which Liptrot co-wrote with director Nora Fingscheidt, is that the narrative is all over the place. Liptrot’s book is part recovery memoir, part travelogue of her time back in Orkney and a piece of nature writing about the archipelago’s wildlife and landscapes. The film focuses on the recovery and nature aspects, seamlessly interweaving those elements together. Some of the nature narration feels at odds with the recovery story but it makes sense considering the source material.
I didn’t love how it hopped around in time so much. You do eventually get a handle on where you’re at chronologically (the colour of Rona’s hair helps) but it moves back and forth constantly. It’s not just between the two timelines either – the London scenes are shown out of order and so are the Orkney ones so you’re constantly having to orient yourself and figure out where you are in the grand scheme of things. It gets easier as it goes on and the third act presents itself chronologically, more or less.
This scattered snapshot approach eventually paints a full picture of Rona’s life and I can see why Fingscheidt decided to edit it this way but I preferred sitting with Rona in a sustained scene instead of these little glimpses. Also, a lot of the scenes felt repetitive and unnecessary (did we need to see her as a shocking drunken mess that many times?) and the film felt so much longer than it is (and it’s already two hours).
The film is still super compelling though thanks to Ronan, her co-stars Paapa Essiedu, Stephen Dillane and Saskia Reeves and the beautiful setting, which is rarely seen on film. However, the structure and length hold it back from being truly great.
In cinemas from Friday 27th September