The Outrun
Real Art Ways
Hartford
Nov. 7, 2024
About one hour into The Outrun, I realized that I was watching one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.
It was when Rona (Saoirse Ronan, who deserves all the awards) was being tucked into bed by her mother Annie (Saskia Reeves) after relapsing into alcoholism. While drunk, Rona berates her mother for her strong Christian faith. “You know he’s made up,” she says drunkenly as she rips Christian imagery off the wall. But as she falls into bed, Rona looks at her mother and says, “All that praying didn’t help me, did it?”
That was the first time I cried while watching this movie. So many family dramas are about what the family did to the protagonist, and the protagonist returns to unleash righteous fury on the people they think wronged them. But Rona is the asshole here, and she’s an asshole because she can’t stop hurting herself. She wishes those prayers could help her.
The Outrun takes place in Orkney, a set of islands just north of Scotland. Rona comes back home after ten years in London, where she developed alcoholism. After being attacked one night while drunkenly stumbling home, Rona enters a rehab program and returns home to stay with her mother and bipolar/schizophrenic father, who are separated.
The movie was written and directed by Nora Fingscheidt with help from Amy Liptrot and Daisy Lewis. The film is based on the memoir of the same name by Liptrot. All of this is important to know because the writing in this film is magnificent. I haven’t read Liptrot’s memoir, but it clearly provides a strong base from which Fingscheidt builds a wonderful movie.While the movie takes place in the present, it loosely jumps around time without warning, with the only indication of the time frame being the color of Rona’s hair, which is smart. It jumbles her memories together like how our own self-recollections are, filling in details about her past when they’re necessary.
It’s truly wrenching when Rona starts to drink again. The movie builds to the moment slowly, and the creeping sense of dread Fingscheidt creates evolves naturally. By the time Rona sees the half-drunk glass of wine in her father’s caravan as he lies catatonic in a schizophrenic episode, you already know what’s about to happen. That doesn’t make it any easier to watch.
The film never babies Rona either. It doesn’t justify her self-destructiveness based on her parents . Her ex-boyfriend Daynin (played with palpable emotion by Paapa Essiedu) is sympathetic to her while consistently letting her know that she’s making the wrong choices for herself without lecturing her. His face does all of the talking.
One of the subplots of the film is a new job that Rona gets when she returns home. She begins working for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which tasks her with the job of searching for the rare corn crake bird. She has to listen for a very specific bird call to identify the bird, and spends countless nights trying to find it, to no avail.
This is a movie, so the audience knows full well that she’ll hear the bird at some point, and most astute watchers can even guess when. But that small detail reinforces the narrative. It brings a sense of completeness to the story even though we know that Rona will continue to struggle with her sobriety. “I can’t be happy sober,” she says to one of her friends from her addiction meeting. I don’t believe that’s true, and by the end of the movie, it doesn’t seem like Rona believes it anymore either.
The Outrun is a fantastic movie. It really feels like I watched something special.
NEXT
Real Art Ways is showing Conclave beginning November 8.
Jamil is going to enjoy the weekend. See you next week!
