The Outrun

Saoirse Ronan's powerfully internalized performance as a newly sober alcoholic struggling to rebuild her life lifts Nora Fingscheidt's externalized, rudderless, and unfocused non-linear drama, adapted with Amy Liptrot from her memoir. Rona (Ronan) is a wild woman in her late twenties who returns to her home in the Orkney Islands off the Scottish coast after over a decade of living rough and tumble in London. Now fresh out of rehab, she reconnects with the wild landscapes and harsh natural elements of the Northern Isles environment in an attempt to build a new life despite her lack of faith in herself.

Fingscheidt's direction feels as lost at sea as her protagonist, and that's not a good thing. Employing many semi-cinematic techniques—literary voice-over, elaborate sound design, fragmentary flashbacks that are sometimes subjective memory, sometimes narrative exposition, sometimes totally random; and even resorting to animation at one point—Fingscheidt ends up making a sub-par version of the same standard film about an addict trying to come to terms with a troubled past and make a new life. It's really too bad because the principal assets of this picture—its setting and its lead performance—are so striking we can imagine the great film this might have been had the filmmakers had the confidence and skill to tell a straightforward story.

The more we learn about Rona's past in London with her boyfriend (Paapa Essiedu), the less sense we have of their connection and how it fell apart. The more we discover about Rona's childhood, with her bipolar father (Stephen Dillane) and desperately religious mother (Saskia Reeves), the more we wish this story just let us sit with these relationships in the present day. There are some terrific individual scenes in this movie in which we learn about the character through her behavior as if the film were an actual character study, but these lovely, sad, and occasionally hopeful human moments are overshadowed by directorial manipulations that feel like someone trying to cram as much of a novel as possible into a cinematic structure.