The Outrun (2024)

If you are fan of the very adaptable Saoirse Ronan then you'll probably love this - she throws just about everything into the role of "Rona". She has returned to her mother's home in Orkney to recover from a fairly torrid time of booze and drugs in London. The timelines are threaded together to drip feed us the causes of her current predicament whilst looking at her own efforts to get - and stay - clean. Of course, there are domestic issues at home too with her father suffering from bi-polar disorder and her mother having turned to religion which add to the turbulence of her life. In the end, she takes a job working on a remote island for the RSPB trying to find an example of the once plentiful but now rare corn crake. With the weather closing in on her small cottage and her determined to get well again despite the familial pressures, the woman has her work cut out for her. Can she stay the course or is a relapse inevitable? It is a strong effort from Ronan here, and Andrew Dillane also delivers quite effectively as her dad - especially once the film has got up an head of steam and the characters more fully develop. The photography of this sometimes beautiful and other times bleak environment adds really well to the overarching sense of the claustrophobic as the story plays out. Her self-imposed isolation flying in the face of her naturally more gregarious personality. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the treatment techniques and struggles involved here, but it does provide us with a powerfully character-led drama that must have cost a fortune in hair dye and doesn't offer any rose-tinted solutions.

The struggle to overcome addiction is indeed a noble one, and it’s been the subject of many fine films over the years. The same is true of movies that explore individual efforts to get one’s life back on track by returning home to one’s roots, both as a way of finding oneself and healing. And, in the latest effort from writer-director Nora Fingscheidt, viewers get some of both of these cinematic motifs, based on the fact-based memoir penned by author and journalist Amy Liptrot. The film follows the odyssey of London-based biologist Rona (Saoirse Ronan), whose wild child tendencies and descent into alcoholism cost her a promising career and a loving relationship with her significant other, Daynin (Paapa Essiedu). But, after successfully undergoing a 12-step program, she decides to return home to the Orkney Islands just off the coast of Scotland to recover and regroup. While there, however, she must confront the ghosts of a past that may have contributed to the development of her substance abuse, most notably dealing with her separated, dysfunctional parents, Annie (Saskia Reeves), a born-again, sometimes-overbearing fundamentalist Christian, and Andrew (Stephen Dillane), a bipolar sheep farmer who has some questionable habits of his own. In telling this story, Rona’s experiences are presented in nonlinear fashion, mixing flashbacks with her period of recovery, a commonly employed approach used in films like this. However, despite Ronan’s phenomenal performance, some truly poetic script writing and the picture’s gorgeous cinematography of the windswept Scottish landscape, the film’s back-and-forth narrative can at times be confusing (and annoying), not to mention repetitive. What’s more, save for some of this story’s unique particulars, the material at times is rather predictable – indeed, almost clichéd -- when it comes to pictures in this genre, offering little in the way of groundbreaking insights. That’s unfortunate, because, with a little fine-tuning in these regards, this could have been one of the year’s better releases. However, as it stands now, the finished product sometimes feels like it gets in its own way, and that’s caused “The Outrun” to be treated more like “The Also-ran” instead of a bona fide awards season contender, one whose strengths, unfortunately, have been generally overlooked or ignored. This is a story that definitely deserved better, and it’s a shame that it didn’t get it.