Addiction-recovery stories serve a purpose in the real world, forging a point of connection between individuals who have gone through—or are going through—the hell of crawling their way out of addiction. Misery doesn’t just love company; often, it desperately needs it. The last thing people struggling with drug or alcohol dependency need to feel is alone. That’s not to say, though, that these stories always work dramatically. Once you’ve seen the typical arc, you usually pretty much know what’s in store: a character hits rock bottom, then begins the slow climb out of the hole. And the slow climb is often the part that inherently drags a movie down.
Director Nora Fingscheidt mostly avoids that problem in The Outrun, an adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir about returning to her family’s farm in Orkney as she figures out how to live without alcohol. (The script was written by Fingscheidt and Liptrot, adapted partly from a story the two cowrote with Daisy Lewis.) The trick, maybe, is that Fingscheidt doesn’t so much construct a plot as let the story dictate its own rhythms; her slightly abstract style sometimes resembles that of the dazzling Scottish filmmaker Lynn Ramsay. The crashing of waves, the somber recrimination of chilly charcoal clouds: for the young woman at the center of this story, Rona—played, in a marvelously nuanced performance by Saoirse Ronan—these are both markers of time and reminders that sometimes it’s necessary to temporarily drop out of time, to give your head and heart and body the chance to get back in tune with one another. This is a story about a seemingly unforgiving landscape that’s actually giving back every minute, once Rona reopens herself to its windswept language.
The story opens 117 days into Rona’s sobriety. She’s returned to the locale where she grew up, but nothing there is the same—and of course, she isn’t, either. The family sheep farm is still tended by her reclusive father, Andrew (Stephen Dillane), who is bipolar; Rona stays with her mother, Annie (Saskia Reeves), who has long been separated from Andrew—she has found religion, and seems to think it’s the answer for Rona, too.
But nothing is ever that easy. We see flashbacks of Rona’s old life in London, where she lived for 10 years. She’s a biologist, intelligent and potentially successful, but alcohol has derailed her life and her career. Her partner in London, Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), clearly cares deeply for her, but he can’t compete with her addiction. Though we don’t see in detail the moment she hits bottom, Fingscheidt gives us a clear enough sense of what’s happened: Rona stumbles out of a pub late one night and accepts a ride from a stranger; later, we see her bruised face and, more significantly, the look of defeat in her eyes, a defeat that also carries a spark of determination. We get flashes of her time in rehab. And then we’re brought back to Orkney, where Rona is slowly reconnecting with the world that formed her. We see her birthing lambs, pulling them, in all their slimy glory, from their mothers. She spends a lot of time staring at the cold, gray ocean—we see the heads of seals bobbing inquisitively in the water. In voiceover, Rona spins out mythical tales about those seals, and how they sometimes take the form of humans. There’s also an Orkney origin story involving a giant sea serpent. She wonders aloud if she can ever be happy sober. She’s feeling her way to the answer to that question.
Read More: The Story Behind The Outrun
We also see flashbacks of her childhood, and how her father’s manic episodes were at once exhilarating, scary, and, particularly in this corner of the world, incomprehensible. “If you go mad in Orkney, they just fly you out,” she explains matter-of-factly. Fingscheidt weaves all these elements into this nubby cloth of a movie, one that avoids many of the clichés of addiction-recovery stories while also acknowledging the reasons those clichés exist in the first place. The nagging episodes of self-doubt, the relapses, the jumble of terror and joy that comes with having to live with your own raw feelings: sometimes the things we refer to as clichés are really just shared experiences.
Ronan can carry it all, and Fingscheidt knows it. A significant portion of the story is set on the small, remote island of Papay, where Rona retreats to think about how she might reshape her life—and also sits down to record her experiences and feelings. (The tiny house we see in the movie is the very one in which Liptrot wrote her book, and some of the people appearing in the film are locals.) Ronan helps us feel the shape and weight of those long stretches of solitary time. She has the kind of face that always seems to be seeking the answer to a question; nothing is finite or definitive with her. As Rona, she stands before us both as a human being and a set of unfolding possibilities. We watch her coaxing those lambs into the world, swinging them by the legs to get them breathing, or, when necessary, bringing their lives to a swift, merciful end. With her translucent skin and intense, clairvoyant eyes, she too seems newborn, unprepared for the future but ready to face it even so. At one point a Papay local, long in recovery himself, tells her, “It never gets easy. It just gets less hard.” We can see Rona simultaneously taking that truth to heart and laying it out, in all its splendor, before us. As Ronan plays her, she takes her one day at a time one heartbeat at a time. The heartbeats, and the days, gradually pile up. And somehow, our pulse has synchronized with hers.
