Vague Visages’ The Outrun review contains minor spoilers. Nora Fingscheidt’s 2024 movie features Saoirse Ronan, Saskia Reeves and Stephen Dillane. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

Alcoholism affects millions of people worldwide in unique ways, but in cinema, it’s depicted largely via impersonal dramatic cliches. Despite being adapted from Amy Liptrot’s memoir of the same name and co-written for the screen by the book author and director Nora Fingscheidt, The Outrun feels lacking in the specificity that makes for rewarding character drama. Despite its intimate feel, this is a tried-and-tested tale of a woman finding herself by leaving the world behind, with the drip-feed of narrative context about her battles with addiction striking only in how ordinarily familiar they are. If the aim was to get audience members to recognize that alcohol abuse doesn’t necessarily mean drinking yourself to death, then there is an importance to the way the subject is approached. But what makes for a striking drug awareness campaign doesn’t necessarily make for a rewarding drama.

Flitting in-between timelines, Fingscheidt introduces Rona (Saoirse Ronan) as she’s relocated back to her childhood home in the Orkney Islands for a job with the nature charity RSPB. It’s immediately clear that moving near the location and surrounding herself with the natural world is a deliberate reprieve from the temptations of the big city, where her relationship with partner Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) became strained due to a casual alcohol addiction. There’s no rock-bottom moment for Rona; she just tends to drink a lot, argue with strangers and throw up on nights out, and causes several more arguments when she returns home. Through being made aware of the circular nature of this routine, and how it begins to distance her from responsibilities in her personal and professional life, Rona aims to get on the wagon and remain onboard.

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When The Outrun premiered at the Sundance Film Festival back in January, the discourse was centered solely around Ronan’s Oscar chances, with even the most positive reviews conceding that her leading turn overshadows the more low-key film around her. I can only assume this was another case of Park City’s altitude affecting the critical capacities of attendees, as while Ronan does her best with the material, her performance suffers due to the screenplay’s insistence on keeping Rona at a remove. That’s why it’s such a surprise to learn The Outrun is a semi-autobiographical work from the original author, considering how the film seems uninterested in getting under the skin of her surrogate character; Rona’s lowest moments are decidedly undramatic, with no clear rock bottom she must bounce back from. 

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Again, this would be refreshing if The Outrun were a PSA informing people of the signs of casual alcoholism, but the fragments of the character’s reckless behavior feel less like an examination of alcohol dependency and more like the most mundane variations on a bad night out. It bears repeating that the messiest moments are tipsy arguments with strangers, throwing up in nightclub toilets and stumbling home drunk afterwards. Beyond that, only a couple of scenes showing Rona sneaking gulps of vodka help contextualize why her relationships have become strained outside of the club. Those key moments in the protagonist’s personal relationships are largely relegated offscreen in a way that undermines the severity of her addiction and the toll it’s taking.

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If I were to be uncharitable, it does feel like the harsher personal experiences in The Outrun have been very deliberately softened to make this depiction of alcoholism feel as universally relatable (or at the very least, recognizable) as possible. The lack of sensationalism that stems from this would be commendable if it didn’t feel like Fingscheidt ticked through a list of cliches, all depicted with punches pulled. It’s not that the movie is trying to avoid the less glamorous aspects of addiction altogether; one man at Rona’s rehab center references his decades-long estrangement from a family he is legally barred from seeing, and another discusses wetting the bed while his partner was sleeping next to him. The latter moment is played as a comic beat, which is understandable on paper but frustrating in practice. As with all the testimonies Rona hears, The Outrun never dwells on the characters relating them beyond their respective sequences, and yet each of those case studies possesses more dramatic intrigue, and seemingly weightier personal stakes for the person involved, than her own. 

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When reviewing a film tackling a sensitive subject like this, I need to repeatedly caution that I’m not in any way trying to undermine the author’s personal experience, just reflecting on the surprisingly empty, unengaging way that it’s been rendered for the screen. It’s particularly surprising because Fingscheidt is a perfect fit for grueling material in this vein based on her 2019 fiction debut System Crasher — an uncompromising account of a child with anger issues and her inability to find a home within the foster system. It’s a loud, abrasive movie which didn’t flinch from its young protagonist’s liabilities, culminating in one of the most shocking moments of violence in recent memory. System Crasher was selected as Germany’s Oscar submission that year but missed out on a nomination. I can’t help but feel Fingscheidt has sanded off the rougher edges so that The Outrun has a chance of avoiding the same fate. It’s an approach that transforms what should be an effective, gut-punch of a drama into a feature-length shrug.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper.

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