The Outrun

dir: Nora Fingscheidt

2024

Reviewing movies about addiction is sometimes hard, for me. I feel like a bit of a hypocrite ‘sitting’ in judgement of people who struggle with their demons, on our screens, for our entertainment or edification or both / neither. It doesn’t help when it’s a true story either.

That makes it even harder to have some distance from. And yet perhaps for those very reasons I am drawn to these kinds of stories, to these people who have struggled and ‘won’ and ‘lost’, who have hit bottom again and again, only to not give up hope. We don’t get the stories from those who lost hope, because they’re not around anymore, or sometimes didn’t last long enough to record their struggle. Amy Liptrot did get to survive, and did get to write her memoir, and here is the movie made about that time, with Saoirse Ronan as her stand in Rona.

The story is told in a non-linear, non-chronological fashion, jumping around in time depending on what wounds Rona has on her, and her hair colour (in that it has a partial similarity to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where Clementine’s hair colour would indicate where in time the story was up to, but there are no other similarities thematically). There is a central event that the narrative keeps going back to, again and again and again, of a night where Rona refused to leave a pub that was closing, drank stray drinks, fought with staff, was physically thrown out, and ended up being assaulted by an opportunistic predator, resulting in hospitalisation.

The present, we hope, is a time of continued sobriety, as Rona tries to maintain her tenuous grip, and struggles with the people around her. Her past in London is contrasted with her present on the Orkney Islands, where her mother (Saskia Reeves) and father (Stephen Dillane) live separately. In terms of how her alcoholism is depicted, it’s pretty awful. It’s the level of dependence where one drink is too many and a thousand is not enough, and everyone around her including her partner Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) are begging her not to drink more.

It’s not that when she drinks, she drinks to excess. She is shown being way more drunk than anyone else around her at any time, and drinking constantly regardless of the situation, or time of day.

And yet there are of course the scenes of utter euphoria where she is entranced and enveloped in a feeling that she is one with everyone and everything and feels so much joy she looks like her heart could explode. And she feels like the music / vibration of life itself, of the planet itself, not only courses through her, but that she herself can control it, conduct it, direct it.

It’s frustrating to watch. It’s sickening / worrying to watch. Watching her partner plead with her to stop, and watching her damage herself and him in pursuit of another drink is horrifying. But that’s not the entirety of the film. The ugliness of how completely she is in thrall to the demon drink is counterbalanced with how fragile the peace of her sobriety is, how tenuous it feels. How precarious everything is at any given moment.

It’s not that Nora is portrayed as a flawed angel or anything. I’m not going to say that it’s a complex character that’s portrayed, because most of her struggle is internalised, with some voiceover often elucidating upon some of her thoughts and imaginings (presumably taken straight from the memoir). But she is honest about her failings, and that leads to scenes where her admissions don’t follow the pattern of what we think these kinds of stories are meant to take. When she is drunk (in the flashback scenes, or in scenes of relapse) she is not some eloquent drunk expounding with conviction on how great she is and how much everyone else sucks. You know, like a Christopher Hitchens or a Dorothy Parker. She is a mean, messy drunk. We are given to understand, or at least I saw it this way, that everything she says while drunk is terrible, self-serving and unlikely to be true.

She berates her partner / former partner for wanting to control her when he’s trying to stop her from killing herself or them both. She berates her mother for her faith, which she declares to be a sham, as if drunks aren’t proof that there is a God, and that He loves watching us stumble for His Divine Amusement. She admits, in one of her rehab stints, that she is deathly afraid that she might never feel happy again without alcohol, which many of the people fighting for sobriety around her nod their heads to, as if to admit they sometimes have the same fear.

A point that isn’t made explicit in words, but is underlined visually, is that she perhaps is prey to an element of the mental illness that seems to dominate her father’s life. She remembers, and so we watch, scenes of herself as a young girl watching her father ranting and raving during manic episodes, smashing the windows of their house so as to let the wailing winds in, which he thinks he controls. Scenes of him being escorted off the premises by the constables. Scenes of him catatonically depressed in bed, unable to move or talk for days or weeks afterwards.

It's not explicitly diagnosed, but we wonder if she, too, is susceptible to the extremes of mania and depression, and whether the alcohol was her way of dealing either with those extremes or with her fear of going too far in either direction. Or whether we’re all flawed beings just trying to get through the everyday, and that diagnoses don’t always neatly box up or encapsulate a person’s existence.

Life on the Orkneys is displayed as being pretty harsh. Sure it looks great, but it seems less than comfortable. The weather seems to hate humans. Waves and gales pound everything. In voiceover she speaks of the impact of those monstrous waves, perhaps resonating for the longest time, throughout the bedrock of the islands, to be felt by those susceptible to it, as an ongoing hum or vibration.

And yet it’s often a vibration she’s trying to avoid. She’s often depicted wearing wireless headphones, with harsh techno playing, which also represents her self-imposed isolation from the people around her. She seems to not trust herself around people, because she doesn’t know how to relate or connect to them without alcohol, or without the structure of an AA meeting.

In her mother she sees the connection possible of the happy clappy set (Christian godbotherers, young women her age), and is repulsed by it. She doesn’t acknowledge it as meaningful until very late in the story, when her mother explains how religion helped her when she realised she could no longer look after her husband, whose mood swings were becoming more pronounced. The mum character is particularly wonderful, and not overplayed, by Saskia Reeves, who is probably currently best known for playing Standish in Slow Horses, the loyal office manager of Slough House, who ironically suffers with sobriety herself on that excellent show.

Here she tries to support her daughter, but her only frame of reference, and the only one that’s helped her that she has to offer, is faith. So there’s a limit to what she can offer Rona beyond the physical support of letting her live with her, especially when Rona rejects everything connected to that faith.

The father doesn’t really have much to offer Rona other than something to do, since he runs a sheep farm, so he can keep her busy, but when he stops sleeping and the mania comes upon him, he’s not only useless to her, he actively harms her, especially when he gets paranoid and starts accusing her of colluding with the cops.

She has to find somewhere even more isolated that the Orkneys, therefore, in order to get to where she needs to be. As she explains, Great Britain is islands off the coast of Europe, Orkneys are islands off the coast of Scotland, and Papa Westray is an island off the coasts of the Orkneys. Even less people, even more isolated, even more at the mercy of merciless weather. We thought the weather before was nasty, but hell…

Even there the overwhelming urge to drink sometimes overcomes her, and it’s gutting to see, and gutting to feel, but we have hope, and the film gives us hope, that one day she too will find it easier, though she is told and accepts that it will never get easy for her.

When she ends up on that tiny isolated island, it’s as part of work as a surveyor for some bird protection charity, and it initially involved her trying to find any evidence of a threatened species of bird called the corn crake, to no avail. But her time there is better spent, somehow, in the healing she seems to be undertaking, as well as combining her academic studies, since she knows a fair bit about marine biology and thinks there could be ways to harness the power of seaweed to heal the world’s climate ills.

I know, I know, sounds delusional, but at least she’s not thinking about booze. It gives her something to work on, to look forward to, something that has nothing to do with drinking which she can direct her anxieties, her fears, her hopes into. And that has to be a positive thing, for her and maybe for all of us.

I can’t say whether the flick is a credible recovery / sobriety story from other people’s perspectives. I think it’s probably faithful to Amy Liptrot’s story, since she collaborated on the screenplay. I am not a sober person, but I am someone who has a complicated relationship with alcohol (ie. I have been a drunken fuck up at times, but not at a frequency or regularity that has harmed my employment or my relationships, thus far), so I appreciate stories like these well told, well shot and very well-acted. Yet I have lost people to addictions and death, and so I take none of these stories lightly.

All the same I wonder why people are insisting Saoirse Ronan should get all the awards for this role, because whilst she’s wonderful and very human as Rona, much of the role is her staring pensively at the horizon or out of a window. Of course she makes that compelling, but it’s still her staring at the fucking sea and or sky. Anyone can do that. You can do that. I don’t see anyone knocking down your door to give you all the awards and such.

But then again you’d deserve them, and probably so does she. She’s been so great for so many years maybe it is her time to shine.

8 times she even goes lambing which is quite a horrid sight out of 10

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“I miss it. I miss how good it made me feel.” - The Outrun