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‘The Outrun’ Review: Saoirse Ronan Plays an Alcoholic with Authenticity in a Recovery Movie That’s Too Sodden to Catch Fire
Saoirse Ronan stars in a drama of alcoholism that leaps around in time but lands on a Scottish archipelago that symbolizes its heroine's inner state.
The film is based on Amy Liptrot’s 2017 addiction memoir (the heroine is now named Rona), and the German director Nora Fingscheidt (“System Crasher”) adapts it in a somber, meditative, structurally free-form way that’s all about broken surfaces and moods of fragmentation and despair (and mutating dyed hair). This gorgeously severe landscape — the black rocks, the waves, the end-of-the-earth barrenness — is presented as such a head-on analogue of Rona’s inner state (her desolation, her isolation, the ancient mystic connections that could save her) that you may find yourself thinking back to when this kind of thing was poetic in Ingmar Berman movies. The hair is full-on aqua when she’s in full alcoholic cry; it’s that color only at the tips, melting into blonde, when she’s trying to leave those days behind; and it’s sunburst orange when she’s blooming in the desolate yet Edenic natural fairy-tale world of the Orkney Islands.
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