published in The Daily Californian on October 7, 2024
Rona is a 29-year-old PhD student in London. She’s perfect — she shares a cozy townhouse with her loving boyfriend, holds a cushy position at a lab, sports a bob dyed the most darling shade of blue and has seemingly enough free time and energy to parade around the streets and clubs of the city, participating in substance-induced folly.
But she’s an alcoholic — and quite a severe one, at that.
“The Outrun,” German director Nora Fingscheidt’s third feature film, is based on Scottish journalist Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name. The biggest strength of “The Outrun” is its empathy — its poignant portrayal of the nonlinearity of recovery and the tenderness with which it details grief. Unlike Fingscheidt’s previous feature film, “The Unforgivable,” which seems to sensationalize its subject matter and detach from any emotion, “The Outrun” approaches the heavy topic of alcoholism with a nimble hand.
The story follows Rona, played by Irish starlet Saoirse Ronan, and her tumultuous experience grappling with alcoholism. In her rehabilitation from alcohol, she falls into the stifling suffocation of living at home after having a taste of unbridled freedom. The film is interspersed with flashbacks of Rona’s life in London. Without any cheesy lighting changes to denote these moments, there are a few seconds before they’re even recognizable as flashbacks — nothing but Rona’s haircut lets on the shift. These scenes are more often than not the hardest to watch, as they showcase the extent of Rona’s struggles with alcohol. In one, Rona injures herself and her boyfriend with the glass shards of a wine bottle in a drunken rage. In another, she is brutally assaulted after being thrown out of a bar on a solo night out, the catalyst for her rehabilitation.
In placing these flashbacks so jarringly within the film’s narrative, abrupt amongst scenes of Rona back home working at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and attending AA meetings, Fingscheidt reminds viewers of just how unsystematic the process of recovery is. When coupled with Rona’s brief lapses in sobriety, it’s clear that Fingscheidt had one point she wanted to make excruciatingly clear: rehab is tumultuous and terrifying — it’s nothing if not extraordinarily difficult.
Ronan brings a raw sense of vulnerability to the project. At times, it physically hurts to watch her act — not because she’s terrible, but because she does her job so well that one forgets the screams and sobs of her on-screen portrayal are fake. Ronan embodies the numbness, the rage, the hollowness of Rona’s struggle with loving grace. Her performance doesn’t feel like a cheap impression. Rather, Ronan expertly tackles something inherently difficult with compassion.
The polarity between Rona’s life in London and her life at home is, as one would expect, a focal point of “The Outrun” — it’s such a pervasive theme that it bleeds into the soundscape of the film. While home in the Orkney Islands, Rona exchanges one form of self-medication for another, keeping her headphones blasting in moments alone. The blaring, techno beats she favors are a sly callback to her life in the city. The electronic static thrums against a backdrop of crashing waves and birdsong. It’s a touch that you’d miss if you blink, but it does a good job of maintaining the tone and outlook of the film.
“The Outrun”is not just a story that chronicles recovery, but one that chronicles the human condition. It avoids falling into cliché or mawkish sentimentality, and its realness is precisely what makes it so powerful. You don’t just find yourself rooting for Rona, you find yourself hurting for her. Simultaneously uneasy and tender, “The Outrun” offers a refreshing perspective on what it means to take your life back.
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