Addiction can feel “tired” on screen, said Francesca Steele on the i news site. But “The Outrun”, based on Amy Liptrot’s bestselling memoir about her alcoholism and recovery in the Orkney islands, is a “vivid, pulsating film”. Director Nora Fingscheidt “favours texture and olfactory experimentation over plot” to give viewers a sense of what addiction really feels like.
The addict is Rona (Saoirse Ronan), whose life in London as a microbiologist and relationship with a kind boyfriend (Paapa Essiedu) is destroyed through the lens of alcohol. We are shown bar fights and their resulting wounds as well as “near sexual assault” as her grip on reality is slowly washed down the drain.
She returns to the island where she grew up to “seek solace in the freezing cold water, the birdsong, the unexpected mysteries of seaweed and Orkney mythology”. The story is told in “non-linear fragments and voiceover” as we learn about the possible roots of Rona’s malaise: her mother is an Evangelical Christian and her father has bipolar disorder.
The clichés often associated with films about addiction are handled with “magnificent detail”, said Katherine McLaughlin in Little White Lies. The “intimacy and vulnerability” of the contrast between the Orkney AA community, “all older men sporting chunky knits” alongside a “tiny young woman”, stands out.
At nearly two hours long, it is “sometimes baggy and uncontrolled”, said Laura Venning in Empire. It begins to feel repetitive in the second half with yet another scene of Ronan gazing out over a crashing sea. But her performance is so “compelling” and “typically transcendent” that it’s “easy to forgive the sequences that should have hit the cutting-room floor”. It is a “sensitive, non-judgemental” study of the havoc that mental illness and addiction can wreak on individuals and their families.
The film has a “wonderful cast”, said Helen Hawkins in The Arts Desk. Rona’s dad (Stephen Dillane) switches from “smiling and paternal” to “dangerous and mercurial” in a heartbeat, inferring yet again the shaky base from which Rona has had to find her feet.
Essiedu is “as moving as Ronan”, despite a much smaller role. The horrified look he gives Rona when he picks her up from a police station and she suggests they go to the pub is an “extraordinary blend of infinite sadness and a deep-seated disgust”.
This is Ronan’s film alright; she has found “the best role to date to match her astonishing skills”. Plus, it marks her producing debut alongside her husband, actor, Jack Lowden.
But after four nominations, could this finally win her an Oscar? She would “certainly be a worthy winner”, said Steele on the i news site, with her “full-body performance”.
Yes, said Hawkins in The Art Desk, Ronan is astounding throughout, almost “literally throwing herself into the role” as she “plunges off tables and lurches down dark streets, cursing all who stand in her way”.