The Outrun (2024): Saoirse Soars

I’ve been a fan and admirer of actress Saoirse Ronan since her starring role in Brooklyn (2015) – filmed when she was just twenty - and she’s been excellent in every leading role that I’ve seen her in since, including Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019) and good in some supporting roles as well, like Ammonite (2020) and the silly Agatha Christie send-up  See How They Run (2022). She was also good as the teen protagonist back in 2011’s Hanna, and in a small but crucial role in Atonement (2007) as well. 

But in her new film, The Outrun, Ronan gives the most dynamic and perhaps best performance of her career – as a young woman named Rona trying to overcome an untethered alcoholic past and find a new life in sobriety. In virtually every scene of the movie, she is astonishing - spellbinding and thoroughly convincing. Through her character’s highest highs and lowest lows, her performance is one hundred percent committed, consistently vivid, luminous and - dare I say it- brilliant. Not that you can see this as a “Performance”.  As in all her best work, Ronan the actress is nowhere to be seen. We just see Rona. 

[Before I proceed, apologies to Ms Ronan for the title of this review. Although it looks cleverly alliterative, that is only because Saoirse looks like it would rhyme with “soars”; but it doesn’t. As we fans know, her name is pronounced sershuh, rhyming with inertia. I just couldn’t help myself.] 

The Outrun is a lightly fictionalized adaptation of the bestselling memoir by Amy Liptrot, who is credited as a co-writer of the screenplay along with the German director of the film Nora Fingscheidt. In other words – a largely true story. It’s set primarily in the remote, sparsely populated Orkney Islands of far Northern Scotland, as well as in London. The narrative is about and from the perspective of Rona. She’s a young Orcadian woman who has recently returned to Orkney after spending a decade in London, where she had gone for a university education and a bigger life than home offered.  Along the way, while she did get her degree (in biology), she was seduced by the party and drinking scene. She also fell in love with Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) a lovely man who loved her back. In the end, though, the downward spiral of alcohol addiction destroyed everything – her ambition, her employability, her relationship, her self-esteem. Eventually, after a violent intoxication-related assault, Rona got into rehab, then opted to leave the whole scene, and return home to start over.   

Films about recovery are not uncommon, of course, but those where the protagonist’s struggle against alcoholism or other addiction is the core of the story, rather than part of a family dysfunction tale or appended onto a police procedural or some other plot, are far fewer. Those where the central character is a young woman like Rona are rare.  And really good ones are rarer still. This is one of those.

[Spoiler alert: the following discussion reveals plot details. These facts will likely melt away before you see the film or will dissolve from your consciousness as soon as the movie gains your attention. But if you prefer to see The Outrun with a largely blank slate, you may wish to skip the next four or five paragraphs.]

It's a tricky business to build a movie character that, in the end, feels like a fully fleshed out, complex human being. In the director’s notes about The Outrun, Fingscheidt explains that with that goal in mind she structured the movie to tell Rona’s story in three interwoven layers. The first is the present, the here-and-now or what she calls the “Orkney-layer”. This is where we initially meet Rona. She’s living in town with her deeply religious mother Annie - Saskia Reeves  [Slow Horses (2022 –  2024)] while helping her bipolar father Andrew - Stephen Dillane [Kaos (2024); The Hours (2002)] - raise sheep on their small family farm nearby, where he lives in an old caravan. The rural Orkney landscape is peaceful and its coastline is spectacular. [Trivia note: several scenes were shot on the actual farm where Liptrot was raised.] But compared to London, the town is dull, there’s no nightlife, and Rona has no friends. Orkney is her Elba. Its emptiness only amplifies her loneliness and lack of direction. Rona thinks maybe she’ll head back to London in another few weeks or months – but to what?   

The second layer is the “London-layer” (seen as flashbacks) which, for a good chunk of the movie, shares nearly equal time with the “present” Orkney-layer.   Rona’s past experiences invade her thoughts frequently: brightly colored memories – from brief flashes to longer, dreamlike reminiscences of the good times: friends, parties, laughs, dancing, falling in love, tender moments with Daynin.  But over time, her recollections turn darker (think blue tinted near-monotone, as in a bad dream) to her heavy drinking and the spiraling descent to the bottom that followed.  

Fingscheidt also refers to a third interwoven aspect, which she calls the “Nerd-layer”.  It is a reflection of Rona’s interiority and innate curiosity, such as her interest in natural biology; in the myriad soulful seals she encounters all along the Orkney coast, and in Orcadian mythology.  In an early voiceover, for example, Rona tells of one local legend that, we later may realize, bears on her own story: the belief that people who have drowned turn into seal-like creatures called Selkies who come ashore during high tides, shedding their seal skins and cavorting joyfully, naked in the moonlight as beautiful people until dawn, then returning to the sea - so long as no humans see them.  If seen, however, they will remain stuck in human form, but always discontented. 

Rona’s nerd self is key to her connection with her bright but damaged dad; and explains her decision to seek a field job with the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) partway through the film. As Fingscheidt intended, it’s a distinguishing piece of Rona that helps us see her as a full person, rather than a “type”. 

Ultimately The Outrun, is about healing a broken life. For all the talk about it-takes-a-village, this ultimately must come from the self. It’s never easy.  As one character who has made the journey explains to Rona: over time, it gets less hard, but it’s always hard. While, of necessity, Rona’s path has been largely solitary, she eventually makes the radical choice to move to an even more isolated place, a small cabin on the Northernmost of the islands, Papay, where she can be truly alone, away from parental judgements and societal pressures or expectations, and self-dependent. 

Cinematically, her struggle is represented visually, audibly and symbolically by the ever-shifting environment in which she is living: the quiet solitude of the island’s treeless, grassy fields or a clear night’s wondrous snowfall, the ever-watchful bay seals on a calm day, the giant ocean waves loudly crashing against steep cliffs and rocky coastline on other days,  the timeworn, wind-carved sea stacks that rise hundred of feet above the surging waters, and the awesomely mighty gales, strong enough to cause the ground to tremble and boom beneath your feet.  This place - captured gorgeously and powerfully by award-winning cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer along with a fabulous sound department – is a major character in the movie and in Rona’s struggle to rediscover herself and, just as important, to appreciate the possibilities a sober life may bring.

Rona is not an archetype.  She’s much more than that – she’s a person that contains multitudes – which may be a cliché but is nonetheless true. We see her this way this, and by the end of The Outrun, Rona herself catches a glimpse of this truth and of the unfolding possibilities ahead.  This an upbeat, hopeful ending - one that has been earned.

It has also been earned by the film production. The lovely supporting performances and sure-footed direction have contributed. And it helps to remember that the character of Rona and her story are based on the very real life experiences of the book’s author / screenplay’s co-author – i.e. this is not make-believe.  Still, in the end, what I am left with is the recognition that this terrific portrait, which feels so credible and so true, owes a great deal to the remarkable Saoirse Ronan. I highly recommend The Outrun.

1 hour 58 minutes

Grade: A

Now playing only in theaters nationwide [opened Friday 10/4/2024], including in the SF Bay Area at  Landmark Opera Plaza and Metreon;  AMC Mercado in Santa Clara and most other AMCs Check HERE to find a theater near you