You feel the cold watching this movie. And the wind. And you hear the cascading waves as they breach the shore as if it is happening right in front of you, the rustling of the weeds, and the calls of the seals. You also feel the sinking desperation, the dependence on distraction, and the gargantuan strain to spur temptation for just one more day. You feel the pain of loneliness and the even worse instinct that that loneliness is needed.
It’s not an easy thing to make an addiction drama feel fresh and potent, and there have been a lot of movies made about the depths and effects of alcoholism, and yet The Outrun from Nora Fingscheidt, based on the memoir by Amy Liptrot (who co-wrote the screenplay with Fingscheidt) is one of the most visceral and wrenching movies on that subject I have ever seen. It conveys more strongly the experience of addiction and withdrawal, relapse and depression with an honesty that goes beyond the simple themes of pitiful woe or feel-good optimism such a story tends to evoke. It is a strikingly personal movie, owing to Liptrot’s involvement of course, but also the extraordinary dedication of Saoirse Ronan in what is essentially a passion project role for an actress who certainly doesn’t need to prove her performance calibre anymore, but does so anyways.
The only thirty year-old Ronan is almost certainly going to net her fifth Oscar nomination for playing Rona (the film’s semi-fictitious version of Liptrot), a biology student who while at university in London fell deep into alcohol addiction and after several drastic incidents that lost her her boyfriend, went through rehab and has now returned to her family farm in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland. The film occasionally pairs her efforts at recovery in this isolation and introspection with non-linear flashbacks to the height of her alcoholism and its heavy emotional consequences.
What makes this story compelling is that Rona is compelling, and Ronan does as much as she can to bring that out in both her low points and… well not her highs, but her moments of solitary serenity. As one elder former alcoholic puts it, “it doesn’t get easy, but it does get less hard”. Ronan doesn’t ever play this character as having an easy time -even when sufficiently sober for weeks to months on end. Her urges constantly gnaw at her and you can see it in how she carries herself, sequesters herself -as though just being around people is too much (an attempt to go home on the ferry for example, overwhelms her). It takes a lot of energy to fend off the sadness and anger bubbling inside -Ronan goes to that place, interpreting it aptly and brings forth a character whose turmoil is instantly palpable, and whose determination to get better makes for a powerful hook. It is mesmerizing to watch! Playing a drunk is easy, playing someone fighting themselves to stay sober is hard; though she takes to the former with nuance too, enacting just the grimmest impression of intoxication without ever veering into melodrama.
Fingscheidt's structural style intentionally obscures the details of Rona's experiences prior to coming to Orkney, presenting them in disconnected fragments much as an alcoholic might envision them. It takes a while to learn what was the straw that broke the camel's back, but really, a whole host of things could have been -the accidental injury to both herself and her boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) during a fight in broken glass surely stands out. Scenes like these are presented well into the context of her attempts at sobriety; a more enlightened commentary, often linked to the Orkney Islands, their traditions and mythology which Rona further finds metaphorical connection with herself, colouring several shots of intensity in both natural environments and personal debilitation. Visual tethers of understanding and profundity, the effort to make some sense of her addiction, and the hope that those energies can be re-routed.
As both her sobriety safety net and an often potent natural metaphor for the tumult inside her, the Orkney Islands are a stunning setting that Fingscheidt takes ample time to relish in. It's a place of considerable breadth and beautiful emptiness, isolated but never calm, and powerfully ancient. Fingscheidt captures it in a rawness that doesn't necessarily make it picturesque, but it is compelling. And there is striking character too to the spaces within it: the old trailer home that Rona's bipolar father Andrew (Stephan Dillane) lives out of, the tiny home that Rona herself lives at on the far island of Papay with a population of about sixty people -hit especially hard by the storms that come their way. An enticing region, cast truly as the edge of the world by this film's precise translation of its primal ambience. And its effect for us is a sample of its effect for Rona.
Rona is in a constant battle for contentment, comfort, and the beauty of her ideals against depression, frustration, and cynicism; and these manifest in very tough scenes of her lashing out at friends, at Daynin, and at her mother Annie (Saskia Reeves) -a born-again Christian after her divorce, which is a particular subject of Rona's resentment. “Your praying didn’t do any good!,” she scornfully shouts at Annie in a moment of relapse, the most heartbreaking point of the film. Anger is an unfortunately natural state; she claims in another scene that she ‘can’t be happy sober’, fatalistically predicting she’ll always find her way back off the wagon. We see this in action, each time Fingscheidt touches on her London attempts to give up only to go right back -hiding bottles around the house and even at the lowest point of its ramifications proposing a drink with her ex come to rescue her. And we also see the process by which she comes to this conclusion -the mental instability of her father that has been constant since she was a girl and he was opening doors to let in the wind and rain during a fierce storm, to the present where he aggressively blames her for his being admitted again to a psychiatric hospital. And we understand her feelings of spiritual abandonment from her mum. Though she comes home, it’s not for family -it is to truly find herself, if a part of herself exists beyond her addiction. The strides she does make are noble, and slowly we can feel it working -until that joy seen in the glimpses of her alcoholic state is palpable again in a subtler sense by the end. It’s not all gone, perhaps she will relapse again -but we can believe in the knowledge she has gained; critically the surety and self-love.
Rona’s hair changes colour throughout this film, in a manner that puts one in mind of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The colours that gradually fade into each other are very deliberate and symbolic to her mood as well as the stages of her journey. And it is indeed at the end that she looks the most radiant. Her hair colour signals an emotional peak that I was not at all ready for, a majestic crescendo (musically too, credit to John Gürtler and Jan Miserre) appropriately deep. The Outrun is a new quintessential film on addiction and the journey out of it, and one of the great raw character dramas of this decade. Maybe it’s not much to call it one of Ronan’s best performances given some of the company it is in, but it is perhaps her most mature performance to date, indicating she really is destined to be one of our greats for years to come.
The Outrun “is a stretch of coastland at the top of the farm where the grass is always short, pummelled by wind and sea spray year-round” -this according to Liptrot, who it must not be forgotten is the liver of this extraordinary story. Rona is likewise pummelled by seeming forces of nature, but she stands strong against it, no matter how much it threatens to weather her. The Outrun doesn’t yield, she endures.
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