Availability: Playing in theaters nationally; streaming expected in December 2024; see JustWatch here for future streaming availability.
Will the corncrake show up?
Just another film about a depressive dealing with alcohol addiction? Like Ray Milland moping around in “The Lost Weekend” (1946) or a resigned Nicholas Cage drinking himself to death in “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995)? Fortunately, no. What distinguishes “The Outrun” from your run-of-the-mill addiction film is that its subject, Rona (Saoirse Ronan) is allowed to express—indeed, to revel in–the pleasure, the joy, the exhilaration, the ecstasy (as well as the sordid aftermath) that the consumption of alcohol can produce in some people, some of the time. That’s what it does for Rona, and it seems to be the main reason she can’t resist the stuff (her bi-polar-depressive father is there to suggest a genetic predisposition, though of a chemical, rather than neurological, kind).
Rona (Saoirse Ronan) is allowed to express—indeed, to revel in–the pleasure, the joy, the exhilaration, the ecstasy (as well as the sordid aftermath) that the consumption of alcohol can produce in some people, some of the time.
The film and the protagonist Rona are based on Amy Liptrot’s memoir and screenplay, but, as Saoirse Ronan explained at a pre-opening screening of the film in Los Angeles recently, Rona as a character was assembled by Liptrot, German director Nora Fingescheidt, and Ronan. The multidimensional persona they created not only is able to present the pleasure that produces the pain, she also offers Ronan a wide canvas for her considerable talents and range of expression.
Saoirse Ronan here (with blue-tipped hair) is quiet, one facet of the great range she shows in portraying the alcoholic Rona.
Addiction films are inevitably therapeutic, a search for what works and what doesn’t. Religion works for Rona’s depressed mother (the quiet and intense Saskia Reeves, who is Catherine in TV’s “Slow Horses”), but not for Rona, who has none. Parents? Rona’s father (Stephen Dillane) is a nice guy, until his other side takes over. Rona’s companion, Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), can be understanding, but her behavior while drinking, and her post-drinking promises, test his limits. She hurts herself and others, physically and emotionally. Community has a modest role to play. A couple of AA programs, one residential, the other more informal, seem to have an impact, for a while, though the film, appropriately, wants us to look elsewhere.
Above, Rona (Saoirse Ronan) shares an intimate moment
with her long-suffering boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu).
The ”elsewhere” is the natural world, specifically the bucolic yet forbidding Orkney Islands off the northern coast of Scotland, where Rona was raised, and to which she returns, having found the pubs and dance clubs of London too much to handle and hoping that a return to her rural origins will provide an environment conducive to her recovery. There are pubs in the Orkneys, too (and the grocer’s shelves hold alluring bottles of wine), but the temptations of the island of Papay, where Rona resides at the end of the civilized world, alone in a small house lashed by wind and rain, prove to be no match for the healing properties of nature.
And Rona sings with the animals.
The nature that speaks to Rona is not of the back-to-the-land, help-Dad-on-the-farm variety, the latter idea forcefully rejected when we see her participate in the troubled birth of a lamb. In scenes that some viewers will find touching and others cloying, seals with humanoid characteristics appear as help-mates, perhaps, in their immersion, as metaphors for baptism or cleansing (we’re doing our best to make sense of this material). And Rona sings with the animals. Then there’s a bird: the endangered corncrake. If that seems a bit forced, so, too, does the script’s quick-and-dirty effort to find Rona a water-based career, linking her Master’s in Biology with a new passion for seaweed. More germane to Rona’s condition, and more consistent with the drama’s central tension, is the discovery that the fearsome power of the sea may be a source of the ebullient transcendence that she once found only in alcohol, and that she still craves.
Rona’s efforts to find a solution to her addiction are made more palatable—and rendered less didactic—by the non-linear frame in which they are presented. Brief flashbacks of her thoughts, images, and experiences punctuate, complicate, and sometimes obscure the narrative. They reflect the non-linear track of alcoholism and recovery. A critical scene, formative for Rona, in which she is literally thrown out of a bar for being so drunk, crashing against tables, chairs, the floor and sidewalk, and picked up by a stranger, is presented only in bits and pieces. In an apparent effort to assist filmgoers in getting the chronology straight, Rona’s hair can be brown, blue, red (or, as a young girl, blond). With a similar purpose in mind, numbers appear on the screen now and then, representing the number of days Rona has been without a drink. It’s all just a little confusing—a metaphor, perhaps, for the unsettled state of her consciousness.
The US born, Irish-raised actress can be awkward or elegant, measured or soaring, genuine or counterfeit—the unreliable narrator—a person you’d like to know, or one you’re glad you don’t.
This is no Martin McDonagh Irish black comedy. It’s doesn’t rely on a sophisticated narrative. What the subject, alcoholism, and Fingscheidt’s rendering of it, provide is ample opportunity for Saoirse Ronan to do what she does best. As a fall-down drunk, a director of crashing ocean waves, as a woman in a moment of ecstasy at the peak of an alcoholic high, or in long dance sequences fueled by music, the US born, Irish-raised actress can be awkward or elegant, measured or soaring, genuine or counterfeit—the unreliable narrator—a person you’d like to know, or one you’re glad you don’t. Uttered in a residential rehab group, Rona’s simple declarative statements—“I miss it”/”It makes me feel good”—are delivered with a quiet force. She’s able to dip her finger into her father’s half-empty glass of red wine, sniff it, and make us feel that her world is about to come apart.
In interviews, Ronan, four-times Oscar nominated star of “Lady Bird” (2017) and “Little Women” (2019), has insisted that she is “not a method actor,” and that she is always aware of the camera and consciously interacts with it. Whatever her technique, it works.
He says: Going home isn’t always the answer.
She says: If you haven’t been a Saoirse Ronan fan to date, you will be after seeing this performance.
Date: 2024
Director: Nora Fingescheidt
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Saskia Reeves, Stephen Dillane, Paapa Essiedu
Runtime: 117 minutes
Country: United Kingdom and Germany (filmed partly in Scotland)
Language: English
Other Awards: 2 nominations to date
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