Hal Kitchen
Films about addiction are tough to balance. All addictions are much the same and yet each person’s experience of them is unique. Finding the right balance between the universal truths and the specific ones is really the essence of all art, regardless of the subject. Your tale oughtn’t be like any other, yet it shouldn’t become so embalmed in personal minutiae as to lose its own core. The approach offered by The Outrun takes as its core, that familiar mantra: “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept and the wisdom to know the difference”.
The Outrun sets itself in the Orkney Islands, the stage its lonely heroine Rhona (multiple-time Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan) has chosen for her battle with herself. It’s hard to imagine a more symbolically potent locale and The Outrun mines them for all they’re worth in this respect. The windswept island location combined with the recovering alcoholic protagonist making a strained homecoming to a religious household immediately put me in mind of Midnight Mass, though tonally The Outrun is significantly more florid, poetic and realist, closer kin to Nomadland or such like, blending an A-list lead and a select few character actors with local non-professionals. It’s about finding serenity in nature and learning to be at peace with yourself, something her chunky headphones blaring repetitive electronic dance beats demonstrates that Rhona isn’t ready to do.
The Orkneys are a cluster of islands off the northern coast of Scotland. For comparative purposes, that’s just slightly further north than Anchorage in Alaska, just under a thousand square miles and home to just over 20,000 people, lots of seals, many more seabirds, and not many corncrakes. More on them later, surprisingly! It is here that Rhona has returned, coming back from London trailing an unused Msc, a failed relationship and ninety days of sobriety. She divides her time between helping her bipolar dad (Stephen Dillane) on his farm and avoiding her mum’s (Saskia Reeves) church group meetings where she’s surrounded by their concern and empathy, which are indistinguishable from condescension an judgement. She clearly takes after her unstable dad more than her pious, long-suffering mum, having inherited his untameable nature and propensity to fits of euphoria and depression. Rhona’s not bipolar like he is, but her alcohol dependency fills in the best it can. She says, in one of her many voiceovers, that “when you go mad on Orkney, they just fly you out”. Maybe that’s what she’s hoping for, someone to just fly her out of herself.
The story is told largely in flashback as Rhona recollects her time in London, where she was the life of the party and a loving, sincere partner to her boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), until she wasn’t. Daynin is as understanding and supportive of her as any partner could reasonably be, but even he has his limit. Only so many nights he’s willing to sit and be berated by a drunken stranger who looks and sounds like his girlfriend. Part of the downward spiral of alcoholism is that when sober, you have to live with the consequences of drunkenness, the things you said and did to the people you love, and the only thing that allows you to not care is more drink.
Those familiar with alcoholism or even just other movies about it will see these beats a mile off, but thankfully we’re in the hands of skilled writers and especially of the immensely talented Saoirse Ronan, who we’ve never really seen in a role like this before, so angry, so wounded and raw. Even for those familiar with her talents, her work here is therefore a minor revelation. Through the editing, she slips from moments of excruciating numbness to anguished drunken tirades without letting the mask slip an inch.
Though such a film as The Outrun would not have received such wide distribution without one, such a big name could easily have unbalanced a project like this– made it all seem like a self-serving vanity project where an A-list star tries to prove they can still play ugly– but never for a moment does Ronan come off as less than genuine. You don’t give a performance like this unless it means a lot to you, and although I might not say this was her best performance, that might only be because this is the least of a performance of any of her roles. I could be wrong, but this felt like something real to her and if not, then she’s an even better actor than I thought. I think I’d feel genuinely conned if I found out she didn’t have a real personal connection to this story somehow.
Not all of The Outrun works so well. Those voice-overs are developed enough to form a coherent part of the film’s aesthetic, but they do over-egg the symbolism sometimes. The myths of the selkies fits well enough with the story. Rhona feels like a selkie herself. Her sobriety is a human body constraining her and she misses the joy and freedom of intoxication. Many other points of local legend don’t feel fleshed out in the same way. There’s one brief segment of animation, which although it recurs in the finale, still feels out of place, as does the story it tells. The excerpts of folklore more often feel tacked on.
Better they had focused on the selkie idea which actually has some metaphorical bones to it and doubled down on that, rather than this recurrent motif of Rhona controlling the weather which never really convinces. It seems like its supposed to function as an alternative source of that euphoria, one that doesn’t require her to destroy herself, but it doesn’t quite come together. Sadly, I do think The Outrun is better at portraying the allure of intoxication than the rewards of serenity (quite likely that’s not supposed to be the main takeaway).
For another example, there’s those corncrakes– small, skinny grouse-like birds and sadly endangered. While trying to find something to occupy her mind, Rhona signs up to volunteer for the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) and help survey the islands’ corncrake population. Rhona therefore trades evenings at London nightclubs and bars for pitch black nocturnal drives down country roads, listening out for birds she has never seen or heard. Though I love birds and animals of all kinds and got a kick out of these scenes, they don’t really support the centrality of the metaphor given by The Outrun‘s ending. I’ll say nothing against the seals though. All movies need more shots of seals bobbing around in the surf looking confused by the cameras.
Much of what works and what doesn’t work about The Outrun is an artifact of its previous incarnation, as the memoir of the same name by Amy Liptrot, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Nora Fingscheidt. Among the candid reflections on alcoholism, the book combines memoir with travelogue and nature writing and the same is true of the film, though due to their relative efficiency and concision films typically allow less freedom in regards to tangents like these. Some serve the story, others not so much, coming across more as charming little detours.
There are worse faults though and there was an undeniable risk that the story, told unadorned could’ve been too tryingly heavy for many. Personally, I’ve a fair amount of patience for such things. I loved Geographies of Solitude for example, and that was almost nothing but little musings on the geographical oddities of another cold, inhospitable island that’s nonetheless full of life. It would do people good to consider such things more often, even if they’re not entirely relevant. It’s all a part of the life Rhona is constructing for herself, and of what she hopes will bring her serenity.
There is still a sense of imbalance somewhere in The Outrun. Its more florid and poetic side will have varying levels of mileage for different audiences. I found some of it too pedestrian, other parts genuinely inspired, but it is mixed in equal measure with an honest and very vulnerable character study and it is there that The Outrun shows its truest qualities. Rather than cliché, what it depicts has the burden of reality, and Ronan manages to make herself right at home there.
