Saoirse Ronan Battles Addiction in Unflinching Drama The Outrun

Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun, which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, is not for the faint of heart.

Partially based on the memoirs of Amy Liptrot and her experience working towards sobriety in her hometown of Orkney, The Outrun harnesses dizzying editing and camerawork, thoughtful catalogs of the wildlife, and a powerhouse performance from Saoirse Ronan to present a stunning depiction of addiction.

We meet Rona (Ronan) at a low point in her life – belligerent and drunk in a bar, kicked out only to be picked up by a stranger. It’s a harrowing, disorienting introduction. We’ll come back to this moment as well as other low points in Rona’s past throughout the film’s nonlinear structure, which is held together by narration from Rona. Thanks to the unorthodox narrative structure of the movie, vignettes of benders and blurry nights intersperse with later moments in Rona’s journey toward sobriety as she works with her father on his farm in the Northern Isles of Scotland and helps map rare birds for a conservation organization. The effect of this then-and-now timeline is poignant, highlighting the ups and downs of someone struggling with addiction.

As we move between the drunk and sober parts of Rona’s life, we also learn about her loved ones. There’s her Christian mother (Saskia Reeves) and her bipolar father (Stephen Dillane), two forces in her life that have shaped Rona indelibly in different ways. Flashing back to her childhood, we bear witness to moments both tender and harrowing. One minute Rona and her parents are having a peaceful stroll outside; the next, in a different flashback, we see her father during a manic episode, railing on about the wind whooshing through a window he has broken just as a storm rolls in.

These structural choices are buoyed by a forceful performance from Ronan, who fully embodies Rona, in all her complexities and messiness – focused and quiet when she’s mapping birds, but a cyclone of unpredictability and sadness when she drinks. Some scenes are almost too hard to watch, as when Rona becomes violent as her partner tries to dump a bottle of wine down the drain, then wakes up not remembering what happened the next morning. It’s a painful but very honest depiction of Rona’s humanity: She has the capacity for great self-destruction, yes, but also the potential to truly take care of herself, too. Ronan’s choices are bold, visceral, vulnerable, and devastating. There is no ego in this performance, and the movie is all the better for it.