The Outrun review - Saoirse Ronan is astonishing as an alcoholic fighting for recovery

In 2016, Amy Liptrot made a fine publishing debut with a memoir about her alcoholism, The Outrun. Now she has co-written a film based on her book that is a significant achievement in its own right. It’s also the promising debut of Saoirse Ronan and her husband actor Jack Lowden as producers. 

Liptrot’s screenplay, cowritten with Daisy Lewis and director Nora Fingscheidt, turns her into a young woman called Rona, played by Ronan, but gives her an alternative CV as a research microbiologist by training. Actual Liptrot scraped a living cleaning oil-rig workers’ toilets at home on Orkney, then by temping in London while trying to get published. 

But Rona is essentially Liptrot. We see her growing up on an Orkney farm, a daring child with warring English parents, then swapping her adventure playground of beaches, rocks and pounding waves for an increasingly desperate existence in the craggy landscape of “the south” – London’s tower blocks – as an alcoholic. Rona is increasingly at war too: with her life, her loved ones and herself. Like the outrun, a strip of outlying land on the farm, used only part of the year for grazing, there's a piece of Rona that needs nurturing and taming. 

From here, her story shadows Liptrot’s – a downward spiral of losing jobs, then her devoted boyfriend (Paapa Essiedu, pictured above), a spectral character in the memoir, here a loving man called Daynin. Despite visits to AA meetings, Rona is bent on self-destruction, bitchily alienating Daynin as her disease becomes entrenched. Eventually she seeks to continue her recovery by isolating herself on the remotest island in the Orcadian group, Papay, working for the RSPB as a documenter of the local bird population. In particular, she hopes to hear the rattling sound of the fabled corncrake, a bird with an only slighter greater chance of surviving its migrations to central Africa than the drinkers in Rona’s zero-tolerance programme have of staying the 90-day course.

The narrative proceeds in a fractured way, as if mirroring the febrile state of Rona’s brain. Through rapidly edited flashbacks, it presents her being triggered by sounds and emotions to return to scenes of ecstatic sex with Daynin or wild times dancing on tables in clubs until she is left alone to stagger home. She also evokes encounters with her separated parents, her bipolar father (Stephen Dillane, pictured below) living in a messy caravan on his farmland, often “high” and exuberant but frequently bedbound and catatonic, while her prim mother (Sasha Reeves) hosts meetings in her plain little house in town for her Christian group. Rona bagatelles between the two of them in her mind, as if searching for clues to her emotional malaise. 

The quickfire cross-cutting makes this a tricky watch, but it represents a key feature of Rona/Amy’s mind, that she is seeking connections between her childhood and her present life, from the islands’ stirringly savage landscape to the druggy craziness of her young urban life, while the raucous soundtrack switches between electronic dance tracks and the roar of an Orcadian storm. The viewer has to make sense of it too, but has a guide in the colour-coding of Ronan’s usually strawberry blonde hair, which denotes particular phases in Rona’s life – bright blue and lurid pink for partying Rona, blue-tipped for the most unleashed of her bouts of drinking, undyed as her isolation begins, then a final triumphant switch to a rich bronze. 

Ronan is astounding throughout, almost literally throwing herself into the role as she plunges off tables and lurches down dark streets, cursing all who stand in her way. She is in every scene, the floor-level child’s point of view when uniformed men come to take her ranting bipolar father away. We live every visceral moment of Rona’s degradation through her slim form, which vibrates with a furious energy when she’s on a clubland bender and stands tall even as she edges into icy sea with other lady wild swimmers on Orkney, her new fellow revellers. We sense she is slowly rewiring her unravelled psyche, until she finally removes her headphones and contentedly listens instead to the raging thrum of the breakers.

Ronan also provides a sporadic voice-over of passages from the book in Liptrot’s compelling prose, explaining the mythic dimension of the Orkneys – strange folk tales and legends, many inherited from its colonising Norsemen – that she delivers in a way that captures both their fey outlandishness and their seriousness. Prominent is the legend of the Silkies, seals who come ashore and then have to stay there in human form if they meet another human being. One regularly sizes up Rona from the sea, just its head and huge staring eyes visible. She can mimic its call, and it seems to call back.

Director Nora Fingscheidt has a wonderful cast to work with here, Dillane veering from smiling and paternal to dangerous and mercurial, Reeves a contained presence bursting with unarticulated feelings. And Essiedu is as moving as Ronan, despite his much smaller role. In one especially painful scene post-separation, he responds to Rona’s call from a police station after a punishing encounter while she was drunk. As he solicitously tends to her, she cheerfully suggests a visit to the pub they can see over the road. The appalled look he gives her is an extraordinary blend of infinite sadness and a deep-seated disgust. 

The patchwork approach to the narrative takes some of its sting away but also makes it more thoughtful and less cumulatively taxing. We see Rona’s connections to her past with a potent immediacy. In one wonderful sequence, she steps out of the present on Orkney, through a haze, and right into a scene from her revelries. Similarly, grown-up Rona can switch to her elfin younger self, urging on the waves and capering on the beach. This is ultimately an upbeat film, inventively realised, perfectly pitched: the exultation on Rona’s face as she senses her recovery is within her reach is hard-earned and deeply felt. And Ronan has found the best role to date to match her astonishing skills. 

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