The Outrun
First screened and reviewed in October 2024
Director: Nora Fingscheidt. Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Saskia Reeves, Stephen Dillane, Paapa Essiedu, Izuka Hoyle, Naomi Wirthner. Screenplay: Nora Fingscheidt and Amy Liptrot (based on the memoir by Amy Liptrot).VOR:①
I'd have been thrilled for this to add something new to the ever-growing warehouse of addiction stories on screen, but it's so surface-y and negligible.
I feel like I've seen this movie so many times before. I even feel like I saw it repeatedly during the two hours I was in the theater, given how indiscriminately scenes keep hitting the same beats, familiar from other addiction dramas and, eventually, familiar from The Outrun itself. But return and return and return we do.
Nora Fingscheidt's movie, adapted with Amy Liptrot from her novel, is positively soggy with creative choices that feel like pure affectations: distorted audio effects, extreme close-ups of eyeballs and fingernails, sporadic passages of voice-over, fitful animated inserts. Even among that crowd, the temporal disorder takes the booby prize, not just as obvious cover for a director who has no clear style or point of view but for actively impairing the story. How often, exactly, has Rona climbed back on the wagon only to fall back off? Is there a point at which this has stopped happening? When we cut back, even in relatively sober passages, to flashback shards of Rona puking and carousing and making an absolute pill of herself, is Rona remembering these passages in ways that make her want to drink, or in ways that freak her out retrospectively, or is there no subjective implication here and the film is just serving up a pinwheel of out-of-time fragments because this is the sort of thing Directors do?
Rona's relationship with erstwhile boyfriend Daynin (I May Destroy You's Paapa Essiedu) is the bloodiest casualty of the film's structural abandon, since it's impossible to map any origin or shape onto that bond or to gauge any proportionality of superficially good times to bad. Whether jumping together into a pool, naked except for their ski masks, was a good moment or a bad one or even a meaningful one in any direction I cannot say, but it sure gets a lot of play. When Daynin admits in the wake of one all-night fiasco with an especially blotto Rona that "I don't recognize you anymore," we have no sense how long it's taken that feeling to emerge or of whether the Rona he met, whenever and wherever that was, was really so different from the one fire-hosing him now with un-keepable promises at dawn.
I also can't help thinking that smashing The Outrun into such a chaos of jagged pieces lets Rona off a whole series of giant hooks. AA becomes a prominent player in this drama, but it's hard to hold oneself accountable for anything when your life is being framed as one fathomless knot—rather than, say, a clear series of patterns and choices that require recognition, repentance, and some heavy labor of self-revision. "Take it one day at a time," the well-honed wisdom goes, and we sort of have no option since the days we witness all float free of clear interconnections, but good luck making any logistical or emotional sense of what it feels like for Rona or for us to move through them.
I admit there are, so to speak, islands of poignancy or well-played character detail: when Rona won't let a fleeting acquaintance outside a café go about his day without dragging him into cheerful narcissism, thinly disguised as conversation; when the town grocer recognizes a fellow traveler on the endless road to recovery; when a later, more settled Rona is able to ask her mother (Saskia Reeves, giving the best performance) how hard it must have been to manage an alcoholic daughter and a bipolar husband at the same time.
But mostly The Outrun is a mess, obnoxious and ineffective, as hyperactive in its grammar and self-imposing in its "style" as Rona at her most show-offy and belligerent. Ronan attempts to make sense of a part that's both too easy (most of the clichés of the Screen Alcoholic are present and accounted for) and too hard (plenty of connective material is missing, and her later life as a reborn scientist and seaweed evangelist just doesn't compute). But I fundamentally didn't believe Ronan's sozzled nights out, and I never related to Rona as anything but a skilled actress having a go at a role.
I doubt another actor would have managed better, given how tangled up The Outrun is between story arc and splatter painting, between letting Rona be Rona and wanting her to be better. If spiritual progress is the goal, it's hard to feel like someone has really outgrown destructive bents toward false drama and self-absorption when she ends the movie on lofty perorations comparing her orgasms to earthquakes, her teeth-grinding to the friction of tectonic plates, her goose-pimples to mountains or something, etc., etc. She even views the ocean, in a silly lunge at a big-emotion climax, as an orchestra obedient to her melodramatic conducting. I get that Rona is looking for safe, zero-stakes places to pour the histrionic impulses she will probably always have. But it's the filmmaker's histrionics that take center stage here, not the character's, and not for the first or second or twenty-second time.
Again, though, partial credit where it's due: there's an atypically quiet and admirably true beat at the end of that climactic sequence when Ronan allows her face to fall in close-up, as though even the character realizes she has done nothing to earn this dopey hyperbole of controlling the tides, and that water is water, wind is wind, and she's just another fucked-up girl trying to get by. I'm glad she's getting closer to understanding that, as hopefully we all do. All praise to moments of de-dramatized, self-decentering epiphany. But we needn't have followed it with a compulsory gesture to romantic possibility. And we might have avoided actually ending exactly the way the most mechanistic passages of the script suggested we would end. And we oughtn't have needed 118 minutes to arrive at this soft-spoken moment of clarity, and not minutes certainly these, I mean certainly minutes these not, I mean certainly not these ridiculously disordered minutes. Grade:D+
