The Outrun review: Saoirse Ronan plays to all her greatest strengths in this stark addiction drama

The Oscar nominee plays a woman who returns to her hometown of Orkney to get clean following years of excess in London

Is there a place on Earth remote enough for us to escape our own demons? Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun, adapted from Amy Liptrot’s memoirs, wrestles with what isolation does to the soul. It’s laid out as a series of reflections, as uncharted as the recovery journey of the young woman at its centre, Saoirse Ronan’s Rona. She’s returned to her home in Orkney after an alcohol addiction sends her London ambitions into a downward spiral. Nature holds people and communities in its embrace. It can throttle them, too.

Fingscheidt’s film is closely tethered to Liptrot’s book, with both author and director having collaborated on the screenplay, and it’s propelled by her observations on the island’s history and folklore. Sometimes, Rona tells us, you can hear a low rumble in Orkney of unknown origin. Some say it’s the sound of waves caught in the archipelago’s subterranean caves. Others say it’s a sign of secretive military experiments. Or, perhaps, it’s the last stirrings of the slain stoor worm, a giant beast whose teeth form the islands themselves.

There’s an unabashed romanticism to all of this. Rona sources her strength from the landscape, dreaming that she can control the weather. “Lightning strikes every time I sneeze and, when I orgasm, there’s an earthquake,” she says. The difference between the island and the film’s London-set sequences is stark – the smoky, spotlit, industrial clubs she frequents most nights with her friends and boyfriend, Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), are the places in which she drinks until the world around her collapses.

The Outrun slips back and forth between these locations – and the different eras of Rona’s life. The narrative here is slippery and loose, and only works because Fingscheidt and Liptrot stringently avoid establishing any kind of binary. London isn’t hell. Orkney isn’t heaven. Home has its troubles, too, as the peace and community that keeps Rona’s father, Andrew (Stephen Dillane), relatively safe and content can turn dangerous when his bipolar triggers a manic episode. There are no resources for psychiatric care on the island, so he’s always forced to leave. Rona, meanwhile, is gently pressured by her mother (Saskia Reeves), and her mother’s friends, to seek solace in faith.

Saoirse Ronan in ‘The Outrun’ (StudioCanal)

Fingscheidt isn’t afraid of the mess of addiction: the sweat, the blood, the rotted food, and the tears so angry they start to choke. And the film’s sound design remains attuned to how ferocious the islands’s gales can be, but also – in the moment Rona steps off its shores onto a ferry – how the clatter of people and machines can be all the more overwhelming. The Outrun’s true tether, however, is Ronan, and here she works to all her greatest strengths. The film wraps entirely around her, yet she’s far too honest an actor to ever play up to the audience’s expectations of a woman in crisis.

In what’s arguably the film’s greatest moment of confrontation, in which Rona is faced with an unattended wine glass, Ronan crushes down her emotions. At most, a couple of sobs escape. It’s a nuanced, gut-punch bit of work. She perfects what The Outrun sets out to achieve – a balance between restless idealism and the daily toil.

Dir: Nora Fingscheidt. Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Paapa Essiedu, Nabil Elouahabi, Izuka Hoyle, Lauren Lyle, Saskia Reeves, Stephen Dillane. 15, 118 mins.

‘The Outrun’ is in cinemas from 27 September