SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL – Saoirse Ronan takes on her most expansive role in “The Outrun,” a film that relies entirely on the lead to carry the audience through an intensely personal journey. The author of the book on which the film is based, Amy Liptrot, helped hone the script, alongside director Nora Fingscheidt and Ronan, who produced (with Jack Lowden). The trio opted to change the lead’s name to Rona to help provide some “healthy distance and creative freedom” for them all, but the story is grounded in Liptrot’s intimate truths.
We first meet Rona in a voiceover in which she explains an important piece of Irish folklore: a tale about how when people drown and are lost to the sea, they turn into seals. These humans-turned-seals, called Selkies, come to the shore at night and dance naked. They are free and wild in the night, but if a human sees them, they are unable to return to the sea. They become discontent on land, stuck in a world where they don’t belong.
We then see Rona dancing, face bedazzled in jewels, blue haired and joyous. She’s at a club with a lover, both swimming in electronic music and sweaty bodies.
We are jolted to a different moment in time. Under fluorescent lights, she is alone, guzzling a beer as the bartender, with whom she seems familiar, begs her to leave. What starts as a friendly request — “We’re closing, it’s time to go” — turns into a violent struggle as she is booted to the curb. She’s an aggressive drunk, a mess.
The metaphor is profound. Rona is a Selkie trying to find her way back to the sea. But she can’t return because the sea was killing her. Rona is an alcoholic who has lost the life she loved and is forced into a new one, which feels joyless to her now.
Ronan admitted in an interview with the Sundance Institute: “I don’t think I would’ve been psychologically ready to take on a role like this even three or four years ago. I wouldn’t have been secure enough in myself. I wouldn’t have been secure enough as an actor to feel brave enough to take on someone whose ugly parts we see consistently throughout the whole film.”
To capture these drunken nights in the most honest way, the team brought in choreographer Wayne McGregor. Saoirse explained that “he worked a lot on how Rona would move when she was drunk, but fun drunk, and how she would move when she was heavy drunk and messy drunk, and how she would move when she was sober and in recovery and nervous. How she would move with her father versus her boyfriend. All these different scenarios to give me an awareness of how to hold this character in my body at different stages of her life, so that was the biggest way in for me.”
Fast-forward and Rona has left London to spend some time in recovery, living with her separated parents working on the farm where she grew up. Her father (Stephen Dillane) suffers from bipolar disorder and we slowly begin to understand the immense impact that he has had on her life, how similar she is to him. Her mother (Saskia Reeves) has turned to religion, a path that has given her a lot of peace, but has isolated her from the rest of the family.
Fingscheidt tackles the complicated timeline of this film cleverly: using Rona’s hair color to help the audience establish various periods of her life. She paces the film and Rona’s varied memories according to her emotional state. In the beginning of the film, the scenes move from one to the next in a way that is quick and jolted. It is difficult to grasp hold of them, almost as if we are drunk ourselves, moving recklessly from one room to another of Rona’s memory.
Regarding this approach in an interview for the Sundance Institute, Fingscheidt explained: “There are three layers to the story: the Orkney layer, which is sort of gray and blueish and greenish; the memory layer, which is colorful and pink and orange and the extreme opposite, so the two of them are intertwined; and then London becomes more distorted and out of focus and you see the color drop out of it, whereas Orkney opens up and becomes full of life.”
The power of “The Outrun” is its ability to understand the layers of addiction and the heavy battle that a person must fight within themselves to get to the other side and find any sort of peace. One character says to Rona of the process: “It never gets easy… it just gets less hard.”
The film is a simmering excavation. It can be monotonous as we trek along with Rona in her nightly search for the sound of the corncrake bird, a species at risk for extinction. For much of the film, Rona is antisocial and uncomfortable in her skin. Her insecurities are obvious and off-putting to others in the small town where she now resides, and her unhappiness is glaring. It is easy to understand why she is alone. It is hard to imagine her being any other way. But as we dip into her various memories of when she first fell in love, when she spent her days working in a biology lab, effortlessly scoring As without needing to study much at all, riding bikes with her friends and laughing freely, we understand her pain in a more nuanced way. “I can’t be happy sober,” she admits at one point in the film, solidifying the picture that we, as an audience, have started to paint.
The profound thing about this film is that the human experience, addicted or not, is full of this type of inner struggle. To truly be happy, we are required to do so much work. We all experience trauma in some capacity, and if we numb ourselves from understanding our limitations, we tend to eventually fall into a depressive or regretful state. But “doing the work” is immensely challenging and discouraging. It is much easier to find a quick fix; to suppress and ignore. Addicts who are trying to get sober are stripped of all their crutches in such an abrupt and painful way that it is almost as though they must rebuild their entire existence from scratch. How does one experience joy again when so much of their social life was prompted by liquid courage? How does one face their own shame with nothing to hide behind?
Rona is reliant on nature. As a biologist, she has what Fingscheidt calls the “Nerd Layer,” which she also described in the same interview with the Sundance Institute, as a crucial element from the book that needed to be depicted on-screen: “It is the most intimate insight into Rona’s head and her perception of the world.” It can be difficult to bring an inner monologue from a book to a visual medium without losing its impact, but here, Fingscheidt used archival footage and animation to unravel these complicated concepts and “nerdy” diatribes. And due to the aesthetic choices made in these montages, it worked. A factoid that Ronan found the most surprising is that human beings share about 60% of the same DNA as jellyfish, for example.
Through these elements, we learn factual and historical information from Rona, but we also gain a more layered understanding of her as a person: her logical and scientific approach to life.
“The Outrun” is one of the films from the festival that isn’t easy to shake. The details and monotony connect us so deeply with the character that every small victory feels earned. We become her, in a sense. We feel her struggle and, therefore, we also feel her ecstasy after jumping into the icy waters of the Northern Sea, or the hope that comes with finally feeling passionate about something after years of disillusionment.
It is a beautiful film in every sense of the world and Saoirse Ronan, just 29 years old, has proved once again that she is one of the finest working actors today.
The film feels cathartic and intelligent. It shows, not tells, the transformative power of healing — through wildlife, the sea, the expansive cliffs overlooking what seems like an abyss. The healing powers of the wind and a strong fire. The metamorphosis that comes from moving through one’s pain and the strength that metastasizes from small things: lighting candles, dancing to music, cooking your favorite meal.
These little moments, these small wins, are what make up a life.