The Outrun (2024)

Directed by Nora Fingscheidt

Sony Pictures Classic, 118 minutes, R (brief sexuality, language)

★★★ ½

 

It takes patience to enjoy The Outrun for several reasons. Working from Amy Liptrot’s memoir director Nora Fingscheidt has assembled a film that features terrific acting and the spectacular choreography of Wayne McGregor, but the story is told via fractured time, flashbacks, and even snippets of animation. The pacing is slow in spots, which I found appropriate, though some audiences have disagreed.

 

It stars Saoirse Ronan who, as always, is terrific. She’s Irish-American, but plays Rona, a 29-year-old Scots quite adeptly. (I guess Celts flock together! ) If you have trouble with accents, you might want to stream it with subtitles. You’ll probably have to, as it’s been in theaters for a bananosecond.* Too bad, as the wild Orkney seas and sparse landscape are jaw-dropping gorgeous on a big screen.

 

Rona’s story is that of an alcoholic. Let’s face it, there are no surprises in such a film. They can only end in one of two ways: either the person self-destructs or gets sober (or sober-ish) and starts anew. The tension comes from the collateral damage that occurs along the way. Ronan’s every thought and move is spot-on, but this is a quieter look at the disease whose main “action” occurs in the flashback scenes. Under Fingscheidt’s non-linear storytelling, The Outrun–note the title’s layered meanings–what happens in between can come off as padding.

 

The Outrun is a smart person/foolish choices film. The Orkney-raised Rona is working on a graduate degree in biology in London, parties hard, and has a sympathetic boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), but alcoholics have a way of turning gold to lead. She makes all the mistakes addicts make and exposes herself to dangers no attractive young woman should. She needs help, but it won’t come from her Orcadian family. Her father Andrew (Stephen Dillane) is seriously bipolar and her mother Annie (Saskia Reeves) copes through prayer, which is non-starter for Rona. Instead, Rona retreats into isolation punctuated by on/off/on/off attempts at Alcoholics Anonymous. At one point she has a field job with a bird conservatory group seeking to count endangered corncrakes, but the deeper she goes into her cups, the harder it is to see light. As she puts it, “I can’t be happy sober.”  

 

A corncrake

 

 

Speaking of isolation, Rona is the central character, but Orkney is a close second. It is an archipelago ten sea miles from Caithness, the sparsely populated northern tip of Scotland. Although Orkney is connected via ferries and small aircraft, it’s a place few Scots visit, let alone Londoners. There are 70 islands, 20 of which have people–barely. The total population is 22,546; three quarters live on its largest island, which is incongruously called Mainland. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit. Orkney has important Neolithic sites, but it mostly contains sheep, seals, birds, cliffs, sea stacks, wild currents, and seriously tall people. (Norway is to the northeast and a lot of Orcadians are of Norse descent.) 

 

This is the Isle of Hoy, pop. 419 but you get the idea

 

 

Why the geography lesson? The film’s stress on isolation makes more sense if you understand the level we’re dealing with. The desperate Rona takes isolation down by several magnitudes by renting a small cottage on Papa Westray, which has sympathetic locals–all 60 of them! Boats and small planes can get there–when the seas and winds aren’t too high, which is certainly not every day. Did I mention that cellphone coverage is spotty at best? McGregor’s camerawork might seem like a National Geographic assignment at times, but imagine yourself on a small green rock in the midst of the North Atlantic and at the mercy of pounding storms.

 

Saoirse Ronan couldn’t be further from the quirky Wes Anderson roles that brought her to light. The Outrun is a classic small film that’s more about ideas and inner struggles. Don’t look for tied-with-a-bow solutions; Ronan gives us a study in trying to find silence amidst noise. But what will win, the raves inside the London discotheques she haunts, the techno music playing from her headphones, the raging Orcadian surf, or a quiet mind?

 

Rob Weir

 

*Bananosecond is a word I coined for things that only stick in culture about the length of time it takes to consume a banana.