In the moving drama The Outrun, Rona (Saiorse Ronan) has escaped a difficult childhood in the harsh isolation of the Orkney Islands to achieve a Master’s in biology and a laboratory job in London. Like many of her twenty-something peers, she likes to party, and she’s also self-medicating from painful childhood issues, and the alcohol is controlling her. The drunken Rona thinks she’s having fun, but her friends and the audience cringe. She’s a falling-down, blackout drunk, and she loses her job, her romantic partner and her personal safety.
Rona recognizes that she must leave London for any chance at successful recovery, and returns to her parents’ sheep farm in the Orkneys. Her parents, while loving, aren’t able to provide an optimal recovery environment. Her father (Stephen Dillane) suffered a bipolar breakdown when Rona was a little girl, and now lives in a trailer on the farm, often incapacitated by depression or mania. Her mother (Saskia Reeves ), who lives in the farm’s cottage, responded by plunging into religion and sees everything through that lens. On Orkney, Rona has support from others in recovery and is safe from the temptations of nightclubs (there aren’t any), but she’s reminded of the childhood pain that she was self-medicating for. She moves to an even more isolated island in the Orkneys and faces herself.
This is a clear-eyed, unsparing look at alcoholism and recovery, of which relapse is a common element.
Reeves and Dillane are excellent, and Ronan will certainly be Oscar-nominated for an ever authentic and stunningly vivid performance.
The Outrun was directed by Nora Fingscheidt and adapted from the memoir by Amy Liptrot. The entire movie is good, but the final 20 seconds are perfect.
The dramatic weather of the Orkneys, raging from bleak to impressively violent, is another character in The Outrun; as turbulent as is Rona’s life, the weather rages even more.
Thanks to Saiorse Ronan, The Outrun is raw, moving and satisfying.