‘The Outrun’: Sundance Review

Dir: Nora Fingscheidt. UK/Germany. 2023. 117mins

A sombre exploration of an alcoholic’s recovery, The Outrun sometimes is held back by the conventions of the addiction drama - yet Saoirse Ronan’s delicacy gives this true story more than enough grace and steel. A compassionate mix of optimism and pain, Ronan’s performance locates a bittersweet core of truth in familiar material.

Ronan’s performance locates a bittersweet core of truth in familiar material

Working from journalist Amy Liptrot’s memoir of her flight from alcoholism in London to Scotland’s far-flung Orkney Islands, German director Nora Fingscheidt (System Crasher) is sensitive to the complexity of this disease, recognising how it is often linked to family trauma and mental health issues as we watch a young woman fight to get sober while confronting the demons that made her turn to drink in the first place. 

Premiering in Sundance before screening in Berlin’s Panorama section, the film will attract audiences because of the subject matter and the Oscar-nominated actress at its centre. The Outrun’s welcome modesty might keep it from ever being a serious awards contender, but viewers should appreciate the filmmakers’ humility and unfussy approach which largely eschews the melodramatic extremes usually present in such stories.

As we meet Rona (Ronan), she has fled London to go back home to Orkneys, where her separated parents Annie (Saskia Reeves) and Andrew (Stephen Dillane) still live. Rona is trying to stay sober after one too many drunken, violent public altercations, and she hopes that her quiet Scottish childhood town will do her good. But as she reflects back on her London days — which are shown through flashbacks — she reflects on what drove her to alcoholism, wondering if she change something fundamentally broken within herself. As Rona admits at one point: “I can’t be happy sober.”

Fingscheidt’s last film, 2021’s The Unforgivable, was also about a character trying to pick up the pieces after making a mess of her life, but The Outrun is less heavy-handed. The new film’s searching, wounded quality is touching, embodied by Ronan as a smart, vivacious person who cannot outrun her genes. Rona’s bipolar father, whom she loves despite his terrifying behaviour during her childhood, has long cast a shadow, but, while her mother escaped by finding religion, Rona has remained close to him — perhaps because she feels a connection to his mental struggles.

Refreshingly, The Outrun avoids simplistic diagnoses, instead following Rona on this journey through the past as she tries to understand where and who she is as she prepares to turn the age of 30. In the flashbacks, Ronan is equally convincing as a fun drunk and as a scary drunk, hinting at the torrent of emotions within the character. There are also glimpses of a love affair that went awry; Rona first met Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) during the height of her carefree partying days, but their bond was severed when her alcoholism grew progressively uglier. (Essiedu is magnetic as her boyfriend, who eventually realises he can only do so much to help this drowning soul.)

There are certain narrative beats that are inevitable — the obligatory visits to Alcoholics Anonymous, the predictable falling off the wagon after months of diligent sobriety — and Fingscheidt sometimes lapses into tired tropes to externalise Rona’s battles with addiction. (The camera gets shaky or the images become distorted, and the soundtrack grows manic.) As natural a performer as Ronan is, always conveying a touching openness, she occasionally has to deliver de rigeur moments of out-of-control behaviour when Nora is at her worst.

But if to some degree we have seen much of The Outrun before, its examination of healing has sufficient specificity. Dillane portrays Rona’s father as a man who can seem happy one moment, in the throes of his illness the next. But like Ronan, he avoids showy displays, keeping Andrew grounded and real. As much as The Outrun is a love story about Rona and Daynin, the good man she let get away because of her disease, Fingscheidt is equally invested in the fraught bond between daughter and father, each of them fighting to stay afloat. Even when the film risks becoming overly precious, Ronan keeps Rona’s struggles gripping. It is a tale not so much of triumph as one of melancholy resilience.