The Outrun

Four stars

Indie A-lister Saoirse Ronan stars in the film adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir, The Outrun. Liptrot’s book blends nature writing with the author’s account of returning to her Orkney home to dry out after a decade in London during which time she has become an alcoholic.

With a script co-written with Liptrot, German director Nora Fingscheidt carries all this over into a film whose themes are addiction, self-destructive behaviour, anxiety and inherited trauma, and where redemption, when it comes, is through family, self-acceptance and sobriety.

The healing power of home is important here too: Orkney is portrayed as a place with no small amount of regenerative oomph, where bracing winds, vertical snow and icy sea waters can help scour off the hurt.

The film is produced by indie A-Lister Saoirse Ronan, who also stars as Rona, our returning Orcadian. We open in London with her drunk and out of control in a bar, then being physically thrown into the street by a bouncer. A passing motorist slows and asks her if she wants a lift. Like many others, it’s a scene we will return to as Fingscheidt cracks Rona’s story into tiles to be assembled like a mosaic.

Here she is with a black eye asking for help with her addiction, here she is at an AA meeting where she is told only 10% of people make it through rehab, here she is in Orkney, brooding even as she delivers a lamb into the world on her father’s farm. It makes the film fractured and episodic but it fits well with Rona’s booze-addled, synapse-zapping time in London, and the memories and flashbacks she endures on her return home. Regrets? She has a few.

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Intercutting the narrative is occasional archive footage and animated sections illustrating the story of the Mester Stoor Worm, a monstrous sea serpent from Orcadian folklore. These are accompanied by a voice-over from Rona in which she talks about Orkney and its myths, further foregrounding the importance of the archipelago in her story.

Adding another element is the job she winds up taking, a stint living in blasted isolation on Papa Westray where she is tasked with locating corncrakes for the RSPB. They migrate to Africa but, again, only a small percentage survive the journey. And then there are her English parents, devout Christian mother Annie (Saskia Reeves) and father Andrew (Stephen Dillane), who is bi-polar and whose intense manic outbreaks have punctuated a childhood we see in another set of flashbacks.

The destructive effect of alcoholism on relationships is further explored when Rona meets, hooks up with, and then moves in with Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), a Londoner to his bones who has only rarely experienced the “countryside”, as he calls it.

“Have you ever felt like you could control the weather?” Rona asks him at one point. He gives a slightly nonplussed reply. Consistent with Fingscheidt’s abbreviated style, we mostly only see Daynin in close-up or as a jittery, lurching figure in the scenes in which Rona is off her head and out of control.

Save when she pulls out to show Rona against the wild and monumental Orcadian landscape, the director stays tight on Ronan too, recognising an actress who repays close physical scrutiny. And, it is, utterly, Saoirse Ronan’s film, even if its stylistic accomplishments sometimes come at the expense of emotional heft.