Nora Fingscheidt (2024)

The Outrun is based on a 2016 book of the same name by the Scottish author and journalist Amy Liptrot.  The book isn’t a work of fiction:  it has been described as a travelogue and a ‘recovery memoir’; it won the Wainwright Prize, awarded to the year’s ‘best work of general outdoors, nature and UK-based travel writing’; and the PEN/Ackerley Prize, awarded annually to ‘an autobiography of literary excellence … by an author of British nationality’.  Amy Liptrot, who grew up on a farm in Orkney, lived and worked in London after graduating from the University of Edinburgh.  During her ten years in England, she became an alcoholic and a drug user.  She returned to Orkney to rehabilitate.  Her book may have been more than a description of the recovery process.  The timeframe involved – Liptrot stopped drinking in 2011 – implies that the very process of writing The Outrun was integral to the recovery.  If that’s so, Nora Fingscheidt’s dramatisation of the material is bound to be essentially different from its source.  Liptrot shares the screenplay credit (with Fingscheidt).  Her screen alter ego Rona, played by Saoirse Ronan, occasionally draws and jots down notes.  Yet the film, good as it is, seems to be happening at one remove from its inspiration – and becomes more conventional as a result.

It takes time to adjust to Fingscheidt’s fragmented narrative, as The Outrun moves back and forth between Orkney landscapes and London clubs and bedrooms, with flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood and imaginings of the natural world, and, at one point, an animated sequence.  The splintered structure may well be intentional – a way of suggesting the unmoored existence Rona is leading – but it makes her story frustrating as well as unsettling to watch for the first half hour or so.  At the start, Rona’s voiceover explains the myth of the selkie: a seal that comes surreptitiously ashore and removes her seal-skin to reveal a beautiful human form – if seen by any human eye she can no longer return to her true home of the sea.  This is the first of many voiceover references to Orcadian fauna, flora and folklore.  Attempts to emulate the strongly visual words on the soundtrack with what appears on the screen don’t always work.  Rona’s remark that she often thinks of areas of Orkney mapped onto areas of equivalent size in London introduces a montage of juxtaposed images – an empty field vs a crowded street, and so on – and the effect is a bit banal.  But plenty of Fingscheidt’s image-making is imaginative, DP Yunus Roy Imer’s lighting is ingenious, and Saoirse Ronan’s portrait of Rona gives The Outrun an increasingly compelling focus.

Ronan spoils us:  she’s always good.  Still only thirty, she has already run up an amazing sequence of brilliant performances – from Atonement (2007), through Brooklyn (2015) and Lady Bird (2017), to Little Women (2019) – in all of which she harnessed dramatic power and humour.  (Her flair for comedy shone through even in a weak film like See How They Run (2022).)  Rona in The Outrun is a worthy addition to Ronan’s gallery of memorable characters.  Everything she does – whether Rona is paralytic or drinking in the natural beauty of Orkney – feels true.  Even when Rona is despondent, as she often is, Ronan is still vivid.  She gets fine support from Stephen Dillane, who plays her bipolar father, and Saskia Reeves, as Rona’s evangelical-Christian mother.  (The parents still both live on the family farm but separately, he alone in a caravan some distance from the farmhouse.)   Dillane was a particular letdown in the largely disappointing second series of Sherwood on television recently so it’s good to see him back on form here.  In her unobtrusive way, Reeves is as reliably excellent as Ronan.  In the London scenes, the younger actors, including Paapa Essiedu as Rona’s boyfriend, don’t have the same opportunities to register but Nabil Elouahabi, though he has only a single scene, comes through.

After sessions in a my-name-is-and-I’m-an-alcoholic group in London, Rona continues rehab at her parents’ home and then, when her father’s depressed state causes her to fall off the wagon, living alone on the small Orkney island of Papa Westray.  The actor playing the middle-aged man who runs the village store there is (as far as I can tell) uncredited on IMDb – a pity because he’s first-rate in what is a small but crucial role.  When he clocks Rona as a recovering alcoholic, he asks how long she has been sober.  (Text on the screen every now and then supplies her current total of consecutive days without a drink.)  When she returns the question, the man’s answer is 12 years, 4 months, 29 days.  He says taking it one day at a time is the only way.  ‘But does it get easier?’ asks Rona.  ‘Yes’, he replies, ‘but never easy – just less hard’.  The Outrun is not only well acted but well written, too.  The title, by the way, is intriguing.  According to Wiktionary, ‘outrun’, as a noun, can mean (in Scotland) a ‘piece of outlying grazing land on an arable farm’; it’s also a term in ski jumping – the area ‘past the landing point, where the skier can slow down’.  Perhaps Amy Liptrot had both, or something else, in mind.

For the reasons suggested at the start of this note, Nora Fingscheidt’s film feels constrained most of the time.  It struggles to break free of being a type of screen story – the story of someone whose big-city life is a disastrous mess returning to, and being restored by, their native heath and culture.  The Outrun isn’t merely formulaic, though.  We can see that her much-loved father’s condition has always been a saddening anxiety to Rona.  She says at one stage that she ‘can’t be happy sober’ and it’s one of the film’s strengths that it resists the temptation to oversimplify her recovery.  At the end you don’t think ‘Oh, that’s nice, she’s sober and her life’s happy now’.  You do see that she feels better about herself and has a renewed sense of purpose.  She decides to resume her research degree studies in London (focusing on seaweed biology, in which she has become passionately interested).  You also see that Rona, drink-free, can experience moments of happiness.  Nora Fingscheidt illustrates these in two very different examples that combine to deliver a successful ending – in which the film comes closest to independent creative life.

As that selkie prologue immediately implied, Rona is herself something of a marine creature.  She swims in the sea more than once.  In the film’s climax, she stands on the shore enthralled, conducting a kind of ecstatic sea symphony.  The contrast to this enjoyably OTT bit comes in the film’s last scene.  While on Orkney, she has been doing part-time work for the RSPB.  This chiefly involves listening out for the distinctive call of the corncrake, an endangered species on the islands, and recording when and where exactly she hears the bird.  When her father asks how the job’s going, Rona admits she hasn’t heard a single corncrake – ‘so not great’.  It stays that way until she’s walking down the road at the end, about to leave Papa Westray.  A sound stops her in her tracks.  She listens, hears the sound again then, as a bonus, sees the bird briefly at the side of the road.  She laughs and so did I.

3 October 2024