Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.At some point, you have probably seen a young woman like the one we meet at the start of The Outrun, being thrown out of a London pub. (She is played by Saoirse Ronan, which makes an instant twist. On screen, the actor is usually a picture of reserve.) Earlier in the evening, she was funny and garrulous. Now though, the place is closing, and while the woman is drunk, she wants to get drunker. The night does not end well.Out on the pavement, many of us would look away in embarrassment, eager to check on our Uber. But the film never leaves the side of this raging, messy figure. The result is an inspired surprise: a portrait of addiction and recovery both visceral and lyrical, reflective and electric.The movie is directed by Nora Fingscheidt, and based on the memoir by writer Amy Liptrot. Here, she is renamed Rona, her late twenties about to mark the point she admits her own alcoholism. The film shares that bleak honesty. It also never revels in her trauma.Desperate to stop drinking, Rona returns to her childhood home on Scotland’s Orkney Islands. Here too, part of what makes the movie so admirable lies in what it isn’t. Another film might make the rest a little cosy: a hot toddy of scenic feelgood amid gruff but kindly locals. And the people are supportive, if also busy with their lives, while the seals that arise from the North Sea are charming. But nature is brutal too, and there are flipsides to a place this remote. Lose your mind on Orkney, Rona remarks, and they just fly you out.It would be wrong to call The Outrun a one-woman show. Still, Ronan is working at very high altitude, in a performance split in two. While the story leaves London, flashbacks return us to the dread cycle of binges and blackouts. Here, the star delivers something emotionally raw and fine-grained both at once. But on Orkney, there are often just the seals and the fragile running tally of sober days, and she must find other, more solitary ways to show us what her character is feeling.Yet she isn’t alone. In 2019, Fingscheidt made a crackerjack debut with System Crasher, about a troubled nine-year-old girl. Now, The Outrun draws smartly on Liptrot’s memoir. Just as crucial, though, is the director’s fluent storytelling, and heady sensory aesthetic. Music and visual reveries pull us into Rona’s psyche. The film finds symphonies in the strangest places. And it makes the case for life by brimming with it.★★★★☆In cinemas in the UK from September 27 and in the US from October 4
