The Outrun Movie Review and Movie Summary (2024)

While the phrase “nature is healing” was largely a meme created for laughs during the anthropause, there was a touching spark of truth in it – whether we were aware of it or not, there was something reassuring about hitting the reset button and Give the Earth a little break from the constant trauma we cause. In Nora Fingscheidt's tender, expressive and completely unclassifiable recovery drama “The Outrun,” this truth applies profoundly to the human body and mind – those that have cracks and simply need a quiet break to become whole again. Indeed, in Fingscheidt's imaginative heartbreaker, humanity and nature are profoundly one, as fresh and piercingly alive as the ocean spray that you can smell and feel on your face throughout most of the film. They coexist at high and low tide in deserted cityscapes, the majestic Orkney Islands (an archipelago in Scotland) and the magnificent island of Papa Westray (or Papay) off the Orkney coast.

An unforgettable Saoirse Ronan plays Rona in one of her best performances of her career, on a stunning resume already full of them. Rona is an alcoholic and immersed in Hackney's party scene in London. She's in love with the caring Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) – one moment she's a fun, tender friend and the life of the party; The next moment she is heavily intoxicated and has completely lost a sense of control, sometimes in potentially life-threatening episodes. We've seen other dramas about addiction and alcoholism in the past – it's never an easy task for an actor to go down such a dark rabbit hole of trauma and make it believable. But Ronan's performance here easily becomes its own beast, even its own genre, as the disease of alcoholism dominates Rona's life. In fact, in Rona's body, Ronan is so moody and unruly that she seems almost violently obsessed, as Rona slowly loses everything that matters to her. Unfortunately, this also includes Daynin after a disastrous night, the details of which a pleadingly apologetic Rona tries to remember through real tears, but is unable to. (Among the many scenes where Ronan will definitely break your heart, this one is at the top.)

A deft adaptation of Amy Liptrot's acclaimed 2020 memoir Liptrot and Fingscheidt (and supervised by Ronan in her first producing appearance), the semi-fictionalized “The Outrun” doesn't trace these events through a traditional chronology or even a conventionally edited structure. Instead, Fingscheidt – who proves she is both a gifted stylist and a thoughtful filmmaker who has the right cinematic instincts to seamlessly blend form and narrative – develops her own method that combines Rona's turbulent headspace with Yunus Roy Imer's restless camera movements and Stephan Bechinger's erratic editing. In The Outrun you're never really lost – just disoriented when Rona is.

But when she finally gets sober — a condition she learns to accept “one day at a time,” as her recovery group teaches her — “The Outrun” also begins to lose its edginess. This change in tone is immensely felt in Rona's present existence, as she is stuck in her home on the Orkney Islands with her religious mother, helping her bipolar father on his sheep farm, caring for the animals and delivering their babies. She also takes a summer job as a bird researcher and comes to terms with everything that happened to her in London. Fingscheidt and Bechinger thoughtfully connect these timelines, adding the Papay segment after Rona locks herself in a cabin after a near-relapse, develops other academic interests surrounding the flora and fauna of nature, and rediscovers her inner voice. (Papay is also where the writer Liptrot wrote her memoirs.)

In order to give the audience enough signposts and signifiers in its deliberately intertwined structure, “The Outrun” presents Rona with different hair colors that range between icy and fiery tones and reflect her headspace. But even without the markers that show the way like a bright lighthouse in the night, you wouldn't get lost in “The Outrun”. In its chaos and serenity, the film is more of an exhilarating memoir than a dull, straightforward narrative. And like any remarkable memory we hold dear, “The Outrun” stays in your heart and in your mind with words and images that may seem small but are deeply meaningful.

Among the most notable sections are those that Fingscheidt directs and frames with a documentarian's sensibility (and a grainy visual palette), as the papaya-sheltered Rona's inner voice guides us through the island's myths, sea life, fossils, and community . Sometimes these four facets culminate in one creature – the island's lovable (and incredibly cute) Selkies, believed to represent the afterlife of the dead. All of these parts are spread so beautifully throughout the film's running time that “The Outrun” often feels surprising, constantly changing and growing, just like the character whose journey it sympathetically follows.

This year, given the impressive lineup of films that are redefining the way we look at cinema – RaMell Ross' uniquely shot “Nickel Boys” and Brady Corbet's big-budget “The Brutalist” – it's easy not to hear the title often: “The Outrun” spoke next to them. But just as innovative, sophisticated and creatively methodical as the filmmakers mentioned above, Fingscheidt deserves the same level of praise and recognition. Her “The Outrun” celebrates rebirth, the spirit of a curious mind, and the restorative powers of nature and solitude as a cure for turmoil and loneliness. It's a beautiful artifact and a cinematic experiment that works beautifully, one innovative image after another, centered around Ronan's soaring and soul-restoring performance.