Outrun, The

Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Stephen Dillane, Saskia Reeves, Paapa Essiedu, Lauren Lyle, Freya Pixie Evans

Director: Nora Fingscheidt

Films about alcoholism have been thin on the ground of late, so this is a welcome look at its dangerous effects. Rona (Ronan), an alcoholic in her late twenties, struggling to recover from her spectacularly booze-filled life in London, returns to her mother (Reeves) in their native Orkney, with its cleansing milieu in mind.

There's not much to the plot and, when Rona says about London 'I'm going back down there soon' she's kidding no one, least of all the audience. We hardly need so many superficial flashbacks to her London life to get the picture, but elsewhere the film is a photographer's dream, both with its views of Orkney's wild landscapes, and the varying emotions reflected on the talented Ronan's face.

And kudos to the casting director who found an actress (Evans) to play Ronan as a child who looks just like her.

The London scenes, painful as they are, lack substance, and we long for a return to Orkney, as Rona joins a wildlife group looking for rare corncrakes (birds), dreams of swimming with seals and battles the booze. The screenplay implies that she may make it, though it's not as inevitable as the sought-after corncrake, with its distinctive cry, making a guest appearance at the end.

Ronan is predictably sublime, although baccy-haters might need to know that she smokes more cigarettes in this one than a Hollywood diva of the 1940s. The dreadful title sadly won't help to sell this overlong but worthwhile film.

David Quinlan

UK/Germany 2024. UK Distributor: StudioCanal. Colour (unspecified).
118 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 12A.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 1, Violence/Horror 0, Drugs 0, Swearing 1.

Review date: 23 Sep 2024