Review: The Outrun (2024)
Saoirse Ronan embodies an alcoholic before, during, and in recovery
The Outrun (2024)
Directed by Nora Fingscheidt
Co-written by Fingscheidt and Daisy Lewis
Based on the memoir by Amy Liptrot
Regrettably, I don’t know much about acting, and that’s because I haven’t done nearly enough of it. After a few high school and college productions, I lost the thread of being part of a theater scene, and instead turned to performance art, movement, and music. I loved doing straight theater when I had the chance to do it, and sometimes I fantasize about ways to get back into it again. (For now, that’ll have to wait until after November, since I’m putting as much volunteer work as I can into the Kamala Harris campaign.)
If I knew more about acting, I’d be able to comment knowledgably about Saoirse Ronan’s brilliant performance in “The Outrun,” in which she plays a Scottish woman who returns to her rural home region in order to heal from alcoholism and the wreckage it’s made of her life.
Rona is the child of a bipolar farmer (Stephen Dillane) whose land on one of the remote, wind-beaten but starkly beautiful Orkney Islands overlooks a usually heaving sea. After her father’s illness drives her parents apart, Rona and her mother (Saskia Reeves) relocate to London, where Rona grows into her 20s while her mother starts some kind of safe house for young women; though she is the same age as her mother’s charges, Rona detests the religious atmosphere. She’d prefer to go out to discos and pubs and get hammered. Eventually she develops full-blown alcoholism, goes through rehab, and returns to the Orkney Islands where she works as a field researcher listening intently for an endangered species of native bird.
If that plot summary makes the film sound a bit by-the-numbers, several aspects enliven it. For one thing, the script by Daisy Lewis and director Nora Fingscheidt shuffles the timeline from linear to scrambled, and viewers have to work to piece together clues in each scene — the locale, Rona’s hair color — to figure out where we are in the story.
But the main thing is that even if you’re confused about the timeline and whether a given scene is set before or after the ones that precede or follow it, you can spend the whole movie just watching Saoirse Ronan — or rather, you’re watching an actor who completely submerges herself in the character Rona. This utterly convincing performance invests the viewer in Rona’s fate, but her accomplishment is greater than merely making us understand and sympathize with Rona. Ronan embodies Rona to the point that there seems to be no margin between them. I can’t exaggerate how completely the actor gives herself over to the role. It’s not as if she’s unrecognizable as Rona, but whoever Saoirse Ronan is offscreen disappears and you’re simply seeing Rona.
Part of this achievement is an extremely energetic physical performance. Ronan so often portrays anguished or proper women that a viewer doesn’t often get a chance to see her athleticism. It’s not going too far to say that she largely performs the role like a dancer, using a combination of exquisite physical control, strength, and confidence. In Rona is a kind of demonstrative wildness that causes her to move, at times, with big sweeping gestures and steps. The last scene — in which, having gotten to a new level of sobriety and self-acceptance, she seems able to conduct the roiling sea like the conductor of an orchestra — shows this aspect of the character best, and it brings the whole film together in a particularly satisfying ending. As I said, as a viewer of the movie you have to do some work; this gorgeous scene at the end is your reward.
Previously:
Saoirse Ronan in earlier films: “Violet and Daisy” (2013), “Brooklyn,” (2015), and “The Seagull” (2018)