Review: ‘The Outrun,’ Saoirse Ronan tale of alcoholism and rehab, feels more like montage than movie

In “The Outrun,” a young Scottish woman’s alcoholism is a personal catastrophe of environmental and geographical breadth, bringing her to the edge of the world, which is also her childhood backyard. The part of Rona is the kind of I-contain-multitudes acting job you should only trust to someone who commands a frame with ease, which is why director Nora Fingscheidt, in adapting co-screenwriter Amy Liptrot’s memoir, is fortunate Saoirse Ronan knows how to do more than hold her own against the Orkney archipelago’s breathtaking, windswept remoteness.
The problem is that Ronan is also forging her compelling warts-and-all portrait of obliteration and recovery in another type of gale storm, that of undisciplined filmmaking at odds with the patient harvesting of characterization. A camera that wants to be as drunk as the self-destructive figure it’s supposed to observe, on top of slapdash time-jumping and interludes of encyclopedic narration about science and myth that pull us away from the central performance, makes for an ultimately unstable partner — no matter how well-intentioned, and even occasionally effective, Fingscheidt’s handling of this material. A relentless bid for poetic transcendence is more likely to tire than achieve liftoff.
Rona may hail from a Northern Isles sheep farm, but as a 20-something studying biology in London, her life is one long, blitzed club crawl until a particularly chaotic night ends in her being assaulted — this narrative’s fulcrum as we move forward and backward. Coming out of an intensive 90-day program, she heads back to the Orkneys to ground her new sobriety in a taste of home: bracing air, lambing, seal sightings, nature reserve volunteering and walks along the rocky coast in a headphones-protecting cocoon of techno music.
But in staying with her calm, religious mom (a fine Saskia Reeves) while she helps her farmer dad (Stephen Dillane), who’s bipolar, there’s a constant reminder that she comes from dysfunction, disease and divorce as much as a place of grandeur and serenity. Her memories of partying inevitably land on the shameful fact that her out-of-control drinking wrecked things with the man she loved, Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), a character ill-served from being absorbed in temporal bits and pieces.
In fact, one struggles to fully comprehend what free-spirited Rona’s descent is all about, since everything with Fingscheidt is a mood: music, sound, ambient editing. A German filmmaker whose background is documentaries, Fingscheidt has lately turned to social dramas centered on mending turmoil-ridden people (the angry child-driven “System Crasher” and the prison redemption tale “The Unforgivable” starring Sandra Bullock). She makes sure we’re always right there with Rona, but it’s a facile shadowing; we never land anywhere long enough — pre- or post-rehab — to feel either layered pain or the hard tick, tick, tick of genuine progress.
Despite the splendid cinematography by Yunus Roy Imer, whether in landscape or landscape-of-a-face mode, this is the montage-ification of a life. And though Ronan is nothing less than a wholly present actor, able to fully charge a moment with coiled energy or the freckled melancholy of her Modigliani-esque visage, she’s rarely given a chance to inhabit a scene’s possible complexities. We’re charting a recovery, but hardly getting inside it.
Although the narration wants to explain the Orkneys’ appeal for us, the ancient pull of the place is palpable. Solitude doesn’t have to mean loneliness: To a troubled soul, the climate and terrain can be like-minded companions of profound, tempestuous spirit. When Rona opts to isolate herself further on an extreme-weather island tip called Papay, this movie that at times feels like a woo-woo solo-journey sister to “Nomadland” does enter its home stretch with a stronger coalescing of its restless style. Ultimately the vibe of “The Outrun” is closer to meandering travelogue than the knottier healing drama we were hoping for.