Keswick Film Club - Reviews - The Outrun

Saoirse Ronan has made it apparent that she is one of the greatest of her generation. Nominated for four Oscars before she was out of her mid-20s, the Irish actress is the sort of performer whose presence in a movie is sufficient reason to see it. She chooses her projects carefully, often movies about complex women, and throws her whole self into them, with unforgettable results.

But how she does what she does is harder to pin down. Ronan does not rely on showy exaggeration or wild swings for her craft. Her most acclaimed roles — in "Atonement," "Brooklyn", "Lady Bird" and "Little Women" — all feel, at least from the outside, as if they tap into some part of her real self. All four are intelligent and perceptive and plucky and just a little innocent, in need of some hard-knock wisdom. Yet they're all indelible, and all very different from one another: girls and women for whom life is a good, hard mystery to be lived and then understood.

It is then little wonder that a full cinema last Sunday confirmed in the outgoing vote that "The Outrun" is an excellent film, predicated as it is on Ronan's superb performance.

Based on Amy Liptrot's eviscerating autobiographical work "The Outrun", the film follows her upbringing on the Orkney mainland, through her descent into alcohol addiction as a student in London, and then her tentative steps towards sobriety on Papay Westray whilst perusing Corncrakes in this wildest of wild northern landscapes.

The films use of the actual inhabitants of Papay adds to its authenticity. The weather is elemental. The storms being a reminder of the inner turmoil which almost swept Liptrot herself away.

The films disjointed narrative is at times hard to follow, but that in turn is, as its director Norah Fingscheidt has indicated, partly illustrative of the mind of an alcoholic.

In the end, and the actual ending, is revelatory, it is Nature which has the final say. Here in its most unrestrained manifestation it has power to heal. Catch it if you can!