The Outrun, Saoirse Ronan in a stunning performance

The Outrun is a stomach churningly real look at alcoholism and recovery. Saoirse Ronan stars in this nonlinear look at a woman’s life from childhood through her early thirties.

The Outrun is based on a memoir by Amy Liptrot. Nora Fingscheidt directed. Saoirse Ronan as Rona is spectacular in this. I’m a person who has been around her share of alcoholics. Ronan’s performance was viscerally real to me. It was hard to watch as she showed her character Rona falling down drunk and blackout drunk on multiple occasions.

The film bounces between Rona as a child on Orkney Island in Scotland. Her father was bipolar. Her mother left him and discovered religion. Rona lived for the bar scene as an adult in London. She cared for Daynin (Paapa Essiedu). Her drinking eventually drove him away. Not until she was beaten in an attack while drunk did she seek help.

She went through a 90 day rehab program in London. When it was over she called her mother and asked if she could come home to Orkney for a while.

While at home she helped her father with his sheep and met her mother’s religious friends. Her father’s bipolar disease was apparently untreated, because he went from lying inert in bed to manic plans to get rich off wind farms.

Rona found a job. She went around to farms where corn was grown searching for the almost extinct corn crake. She never found a single one. She found an AA group and went to meetings.

Rona fell off the wagon after an particularly painful exchange with her father. To get sober again, she moved to an even more remote island, Papa Westray. She lived alone in a small pink house by the sea. She endured freezing weather, gales, heavy rain, and freezing swims with the seals. She developed an interest in seaweed and made plans to get her Ph.D. in the area. (She already had a degree in biology.)

She stayed sober, growing stronger and healthier each day. She had glimmers of happiness, which she thought she would never find sober. She was ready to return to normal life in the city. On her last day as she walked away from the pink cottage that had been her home for many months, she finally heard a corn crake!

This was a hard movie. Getting sober is hard. Losing people you love is hard. Living alone on a wild island is hard. Saoirse Ronan was amazing, but it was a hard film for me.

The film is available on Netfix and from several other streamers. If you watch it, please share your thoughts. The comments are open.