Film review: The Outrun is a powerful and uplifting account of confronting one’s inner demons

Saoirse Ronan will undoubtedly be in the Oscar conversation again next year

Saoirse Ronan in The Outrun

• The Outrun 
• ★★★★★
• Cinematic release

You can run as fast as you can, but you’ll never outrun yourself. Adapted from Amy Liptrot’s award-winning memoir of the same name, The Outrun (15A) stars Saoirse Ronan as Rona, a 29-year-old born and bred on Orkney Island and now returning home, after a decade of hard drinking in the fleshpots of London, in a desperate bid to come to terms with her alcohol addiction.

The theory seems sound: the sight of Rona muffled-up beneath a scarf and a bobbly hat, for example, and braced against the ever-present wind as it blasts in from the Atlantic across the island’s bleak landscape, stands in sharp contrast to flashbacks in which we see the hedonistic Rona falling out of London nightclubs and bars.

And yet temptation is ever-present; you can get alcohol anywhere, even on Orkney. Suffering the agonies of drying out whilst submitting to the drudgery of working on her father’s farm, Rona gradually begins to appreciate Orkney’s spare and minimalist beauty; soon she is involved in a scheme run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds spending hours trying to detect the call of the corncrake.

Nora Fingscheidt’s film isn’t interested in pat answers, however, and Rona’s journey towards sobriety is a stuttering affair, one aided and abetted by her reconnection with her bi-polar father Andrew and religious mother Annie (Stephen Dillane and Saskia Reeves, both providing excellent support).

There are distressing scenes of drunken excess; terrifying hallucinations that give us a sense of exactly how fragile Rona’s sense of reality is; and a growing sense of self-awareness (‘I want you to lock me up’) that suggests that any green shoots of recovery will need to be as hardy as those rare trees that endure the Orkney storms.

But although it’s understandably downbeat and grimly realistic in its treatment of addiction and mental illness, The Outrun is a powerful and ultimately uplifting account of confronting one’s inner demons and learning to live in a different way.

Saoirse Ronan is in stunning form in what is arguably a career-best performance, portraying Rona as a tiny but vital force of nature against the vast backdrop of ceaselessly turbulent sea and sky, as vulnerable and fragile as a reed in a gale and slowly learning to bend rather than break.

Already a winner of the prestigious Silver Medallion at this year’s Telluride Festival for her body of work, Ronan will undoubtedly be in the Oscar conversation again next year.