Based on the 2015 memoir by Scottish journalist/author Amy Liptrot, indie film The Outrun is about a young woman’s alcoholism recovery, in particular the early phases.
Laura Snapes, Elle, “Liptrot had read many addiction memoirs, but found they mostly ended with the author entering rehab. She wanted to write about what happens after you get sober.”
Treena Orchard, PhD, Psychology Today, also sober, describes the memoir: “Part nature writing, part heart-slicing memoir about addiction and recovery, Liptrot’s book is captivating, courageous, and cosmic. So many pages are lit by the moon she traces with scientific precision as she makes it through day after day, and then month after month, of living without alcohol.”
As goes the movie.
What is an outrun? “A stretch of earth that defies bounded definition, an outrun is part land and sea, both cultivated and wild,” states Orchard, who highly appreciated the film version. “The Outrun is a movie about something I tried to hide for decades and struggled profoundly to find release from. To see it on the screen in a mainstream film is validating in a way that almost defies words. This film helps us.”
In the film Saoirse Ronan skillfully plays Rona, a Masters-level biology student who’s been living in London, where her life, including her relationship with a caring man (Paapa Essiedu), has become unmanageable due to drinking. Stephanie Zacharek, Time: “The story opens 117 days into Rona’s sobriety. She’s returned to the locale where she grew up, but nothing there is the same—and of course, she isn’t, either.” She’s staying with her mother (Saskia Reeves), whose religious devotion greatly annoys her, and helping on her father Andrew’s (Stephen Dillane) sheep farm. Her beloved father continues to experience the extreme highs and lows of bipolar disorder she’s always seen.
Flashbacks fill in various gaps about her troubled history. She eventually enters a government-funded treatment program, one that allows for no relapses and that cautions that very few actually do go on to attain a lasting sobriety.
One day at a time as well as the concept of one step at a time have rarely made such a cinematic impression. Rona’s eventual relapse, heartbreaking, is tied closely to her frustration and anxiety about her father’s current episode of bipolar depression.
But she gradually picks herself up again.
This trailer manages to encapsulate the journey Rona takes in The Outrun:
Selected Reviews of The Outrun
Alyssa Bryson, The Sober Curator: “‘The Outrun’ emerges as a poignant narrative that profoundly resonates with those who have grappled with addiction and the path to recovery.”
Sarah G. Vincent‘s website: “Rona’s story does not follow the same traditional beats…Alcohol, a depressant, is only part of Rona’s problem. She implicitly likens herself to a selkie, someone dissatisfied on land. It is really a story about someone trying to find a way to escape the polar legacies that her parents offer her and find her true way independent from another person.”
Kimberley Jones, Austin Chronicle: “…Ronan, and her empathic director, catch without words the sensation of when someone who has been buried under unfathomable pain and grief and trauma discovers they still have the capacity for joy.”
