The most poignant scene in Nora Fingscheidt’s drama of addiction comes with a flashback to the protagonist’s alcoholic decline in London. She arrives home soaked to the skin. What happened? “I fell in the canal,” she says almost matter-of-factly. The moment hits because we are aware that, in most films, this would be an opportunity for low comedy. That shadow version makes the film’s reality seem more pathetic, more helpless. There is no hint of the heroic drinker in a young woman fishing debris from her plastered hair.
There is much to recommend in The Outrun. Fans of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic I Know Where I’m Going! will find rewarding parallels in this tale of a very different heroine – not fooled into believing she’s in control – travelling from London to find a kind of peace in the Scottish islands. The film is in touch with nature in a way that allows no sentimentality.
But it is Saoirse Ronan’s central performance that will attract most attention. It comes as a shock to learn that this is the first present-day film role she has taken in close to a decade. The Irish actor is extending in more significant ways. There is a brittleness and a latent hostility here that have not previously been much in evidence. She powerfully captures the experience of a white-knuckle recovery period, the sense of fearing a succumbing not just to booze but also to any emotional release. Can one allow oneself even a laugh or a yell? Might that harmless loss of control have deathly repercussions?
The adaptation, by the author and director, of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir finds effective ways of translating the elegant prose – much concerned with conjuring up the Orkneys – into fluid images and economic dialogue. You couldn’t sincerely argue that The Outrun brims over with plot, but its rough, maritime texture is never less than diverting. It needles. It provokes.
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We first meet Rona, as the protagonist is here called, arriving to the Orkneys after a decade sliding towards addiction in London. The film is careful not to unequivocally associate her drinking with family trauma, but both parents are, in different ways, at a psychological distance from her. Annie (Saskia Reeves), her mother, has escaped into religion. Andrew (Stephen Dillane), her dad, has a bipolar condition that continues to make socialising complex. “How’s mum?” he asks his daughter. “She offered to ... put me into her prayers,” she says blankly. Andrew’s snort of laughter feels implicitly shared. Serious mental illness can, the scene suggests, be less of a barrier than religious belief.
Throughout the film’s slightly stretched two hours, we flash back constantly to earlier experiences in London. Yunus Roy Imer’s camera show no rural bias. He finds a smoky beauty in the high rises of the big city to compare with the yawning spaces through which Rona embarks on recuperation. It is important, in such tales of recovery, to acknowledge the good times that preceded the bad. The effort required to escape is more easily credited if we understand what relief the drug once provided. “I miss how good it made me feel,” Rona says.
What does she have in its place? No comfortable family hearth. Little buzz and bustle. Her eventual gig locating corncrakes for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is, no doubt, a vital ornithological pursuit, but it also has the quality of a mad enthusiasm her title character might have pursued in Lady Bird.
The Outrun, which Ronan co-produced, has no unexpected lessons to impart. The film-makers know not to make the arc of redemption too clunkily final. Not everyone will give in to the barely structured drift upon which they settle. The depth of characterisation is, however, not to be resisted. Ronan remains a force.
The Outrun is in cinemas from Friday, September 27th
