Tapping into a rare ferocity, Saoirse Ronan stars in The Outrun as Rona, a twentysomething biologist and angry alcoholic who returns to her family farm on Scotland’s remote Orkney Islands after hitting rock bottom while pursuing graduate studies in London. Adapting a memoir by Amy Liptrot, director Nora Fingscheidt makes the most of the wild natural setting and Rona’s interest in flora and fauna, offering plenty of rocky vistas and ripe metaphors. (Is Rona like a newborn lamb needing to be revived? A raging storm hoping to be quelled? A mythical selkie—a drowned human trapped in the body of a seal?) In the lead role, Ronan anchors all of this, deftly navigating between flashbacks to Rona’s partying past and present-day scenes where she teeters perilously between rehabilitation and regression. (It doesn’t help that she has a strained relationship both with her religious mother and bipolar father.) Despite all of these details, there is something strangely unspecific about Rona’s experience—perhaps it has something to do with the familiar look and feel of those flashbacks, full of bleary focus and jostling, handheld cameras. Still, The Outrun distinguishes itself as an addiction drama attuned to natural forces, of both the exhilarating and dangerous variety.
(10/8/2024)
