The Outrun

The Outrun is based on a book by Amy Liptrot and is a first hand account of her experiences with alcoholism.

This film adaptation is produced by and starring Saoirse Ronan, with Nora Fingscheidt of System Crashers fame in the directors chair.

What I took the film to ultimately be about is being lost in your 20's, making mistakes and then rediscovering yourself. The lead character Rona is in her late 20's and originally is from The Orkney's a small set of islands north of Scotland. She's studying/was studying Biology at university in London. It's at university where it becomes apparent that she has a problem with alcohol.

I find human psychology fascinating but I know for a fact that if I was to make a film about addiction it would be no doubt soaked in melodrama. This film feels real and whilst it has emotional scenes it never goes over that line into trying to force an emotional response out of its audience.

It instead chooses to base itself in spirituality and at the start it seemed like it was going to be more of a poem with images rather than a narrative as such.

It does however settle into being more narratively driven but we do get some flashbacks that at times I felt were a bit choppy. At times I was unsure what was happening in the past and what was happening in the present. Perhaps this was intentional to try and make you feel Rona's inner struggle but it didn't always work for me.

That is however a minor gripe as I was furthermore impressed by the films ending. It managed to both provide a satisfactory 'happy' ending, whilst also leaving you with the feeling that Rona's journey with alcohol isn't complete and perhaps never will be.

Who says you can't go home?

It was raw and relatable at the beginning but gets repetitive, maybe that's the struggle about getting sober. I'm not using any substance but dopamine is a real addiction too, all those short videos, mobile games, fragmented information, sometimes I feel like I can't be happy without them either. Nature has amazing healing power and I need to go outside and touch more grass. The dad is the real problem here, he is a unfortunate mental illness sufferer, but our protagonist have to stay away from the bad influence to take care of herself first. Two things I don't quite understand: why the timeline has to be so intertwined and audience have to look at her hair and nail color to know when anything happened; and I get it that she could be bipolar too, but the conducting natural phenomena thing is just weird, and isn't it a bit narcissistic too?

The sea is so beautiful and the seals are so cute.

This movie deftly takes the viewer on a journey to loss and addiction and back again in two intertwined stories - past and present that slip along next to each other, each revealing themselves, piece by piece. Saoirse Ronan's performance embraces both stories with utter conviction. She ably backed up by a small but brilliant cast. At times, you could believe you were watching a 'fly on the wall' documentary, the characters were so unassumingly true to life in their portrayal of the London and Orkney roles. The parents were particularly well played.

Finally, the backdrop. Orkney in winter contributed so much drama and atmosphere.

Recommended.

If you are fan of the very adaptable Saoirse Ronan then you'll probably love this - she throws just about everything into the role of "Rona". She has returned to her mother's home in Orkney to recover from a fairly torrid time of booze and drugs in London. The timelines are threaded together to drip feed us the causes of her current predicament whilst looking at her own efforts to get - and stay - clean. Of course, there are domestic issues at home too with her father suffering from bi-polar disorder and her mother having turned to religion which add to the turbulence of her life. In the end, she takes a job working on a remote island for the RSPB trying to find an example of the once plentiful but now rare corn crake. With the weather closing in on her small cottage and her determined to get well again despite the familial pressures, the woman has her work cut out for her. Can she stay the course or is a relapse inevitable? It is a strong effort from Ronan here, and Andrew Dillane also delivers quite effectively as her dad - especially once the film has got up an head of steam and the characters more fully develop. The photography of this sometimes beautiful and other times bleak environment adds really well to the overarching sense of the claustrophobic as the story plays out. Her self-imposed isolation flying in the face of her naturally more gregarious personality. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the treatment techniques and struggles involved here, but it does provide us with a powerfully character-led drama that must have cost a fortune in hair dye and doesn't offer any rose-tinted solutions.

It's not often that I leave a cinema feeling inspired by a film. The Outrun is one such movie. I have always been an advocate of the healing power of the natural world and watching this beautiful, but sometimes harrowing film, reinforced my philosophy. Sometimes the best stories are the simple ones and this is one of them. Saoirse Ronan produces and stars as the main character Rona who was bought up on the Orkney Isles, but hankers for the bright lights of London like so many other young people from isolated communities often do. The film does well to portray the pitfalls of living in a big city, but also deserves credit for showing the Orkney Isles as a clearly beautiful, but sometimes desolate place. In the same week I have also been to see two big budget films, but the Outrun was by far the best of the three albeit on a fraction of the budget. If you want to see a film that will make you feel more positive about life then I recommend you see this movie. I am glad that I did.