The Orkney Islands are a beautiful place. Beautiful, but tough.
With rugged cliffs, sparkling seas, and landscapes that have been shaped over millions of years, the islands are a sight to behold, but they can feel quite savage at times – the freezing water can chill you to the bone, the wind can whip at incredible speeds. Orkney can be a hard place to survive.
But in “The Outrun,” survival is difficult no matter what – maybe even harder outside of a place like Orkney. Based on the memoir by Amy Liptrot detailing her struggles with addiction, “The Outrun” emphasizes the landscape of Orkney, relating recovery with a connection to the natural world, folklore and heritage. Through her direction, Nora Fingscheidt articulates these connections beautifully, the visual language anchored by an unyielding Saoirse Ronan performance. But the film is at its best when it doesn’t feel the need to over explain itself, confident in the evocative strength of its images.
The stand-in for Liptrot in “The Outrun” is Rona (Ronan), a young woman who returns home to Orkney from London after a stint in rehab. Over the course of the film, the audience sees Rona struggle with her nascent sobriety and being home with her separated parents (Stephen Dillane and Saskia Reeves), as well as a series of flashbacks to Rona’s time in London with her ex-boyfriend, Daynin (Paapa Essiedu).
Rona also narrates “The Outrun,” giving a voiceover that periodically appears over the course of the film and tends to unnecessarily explain that which the film has already visually conveyed. Fingscheidt and cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer render addiction quite viscerally. When Rona is on a bender, the edges of the frame fizz out into a hazy kaleidoscope while the center stays in sharp focus. In a scene where Rona suddenly feels the urge to drink, a shaky camera follows her as she runs through an airport, like she’s being chased by her own vices. All of these techniques are enough to understand Rona’s inner monologue without it being literalized, without her cutting in to tell the audience that the need for a drink can come up at any moment – the vision of her running from an invisible assailant makes that more than clear.
Despite that hint of self-consciousness in the voiceover itself, Ronan is anything but in her performance. There’s a subtlety that’s often lacking in films like this – in one scene, she asks a stranger for a light as he passes her in the street. When she learns he’s headed to a pub, her manner becomes slightly more erratic, chattering every time the stranger starts to leave until he starts to feel just a little too uncomfortable. Ronan’s transition from being in need of a casual favor to resisting the urge to follow this stranger to the bar, is effortless – a small increase in the pace of her voice, a slight tension to her friendliness.
Ronan doesn’t fall into the traps actors often do when telling stories of addiction, although “The Outrun” does have some of the typical beats you expect with a film like this. But outside of when Rona is drunk – when she turns into something a little jollier, but also more uncomfortably vulnerable and often downright mean – there’s not a ton of outsized emotion in “The Outrun.” Rona’s turmoil is more often than not directed inward, making the moments where her emotions escape her all the more effective.
Where Rona’s voiceover works is when she’s trying to make connections. Rona often tells stories about the folklore that surrounds the Orkney Islands, her inner voice trying to work through how she relates to her family, to her home. This national history is just as important as her family history, the myths as important to who she is as her father’s mental illness, or her mother’s late-in-life religious revelation.
The ability to connect to the natural world and to be at peace with its mysteries is a throughline in all of these stories. In the film, Rona takes up a job on the islands listening for corncrakes in an attempt to figure out how many of the birds are still left in the islands. Corncrakes migrate to Africa every year, but the journey is long and arduous. Less than half of them make it back.
The ones that do make it back to Orkney are few, but they’re survivors who belong to this place, as rough and wild as it can be. For so much of the film, Rona finds herself on the outside of the natural world, from refusing to go inside the fence that circles a petting zoo to declining to plunge into Orkney’s icy waters with her mother. Back in London, Rona found a sense of freedom in club music, in losing herself to its beats and rhythms. In Orkney, she has to learn how to sit with herself with no distractions, to connect with a different kind of music that replaces drums and synths with the howl of the wind and crash of the waves. Recovery, in a sense, is learning to be a part of the world once again, learning how to exist in a new way. But as new as it might feel, it has always been there, deep in her bones.
