The Outrun

Nora Fingscheidt: The Outrun (GB/DE 2024) with Saoirse Ronan.

Saoirse Ronan in Telluride 2024. TFF51. Photo: Pamela Gentile. Photo from the Telluride Film Festival 2024 website.

GB/DE 2024

Festival premiere: 19 Jan 2024 Sundance.

Telluride Film Festival (TFF), 1 Sep 2024 in a tribute to Saoirse Ronan.

Love & Anarchy 37th Helsinki International Film Festival (HIFF): Spotlight Selection

Viewed at Savoy, Helsinki, Thursday, 26 Sep 2024

Greta Gerwig (TFF 2024): "I’ve had the privilege of working with Saoirse Ronan twice, in LADY BIRD (2017) and LITTLE WOMEN (2019), and have been watching her transform in front of me as an audience member since she was just a little girl. The word “prodigy” is thrown around a lot, but in her case, it is fitting. Her gift is incredibly rare, but how she’s cared for it and grown it to become the formidable artist she is today, is rarer still."

"She is a translucent actor—she somehow makes her external life transparent so we can all see her soul. But every character she plays is unique, wildly different from the others, so each soul she shows us is a new revelation. She is impeccable with every external aspect of her craft—all the bells and whistles of the character’s walk, voice, tics, and presence. That never ceases to dazzle me. But the thing that floors me is the soul change."

"In THE OUTRUN, I saw a person I’d never seen before from Saoirse, someone so specific and so particular but who also, paradoxically, felt like every single one of us. She holds the vast discomfort and ecstasy of being alive. I don’t recognize her, the Saoirse I know, in this film. But I never do. All traces of her are gone, and only the person of the character remains, and only ever the whole truth of that person. She fully inhabits this other life."

"As a director you spend a lot of time looking at your lead actor’s face. In rehearsal, then filming, and finally, in the edit. Even after months and months of sitting in the dark and staring at Saoirse, I always find something new she’s given me. She continually gifts the whole film through every detail in her performance."

"It’s a magic that she wears lightly and practically—head down, unfussy, getting on with it. I was not at all surprised when she said she wanted to do everything in movies—write and direct and produce. Because she is a mystic and a craftswoman simultaneously, I knew that she would be brilliant. She’s always considered herself a part of the crew, even when she is number one on the call sheet. I have an image of her lodged in my mind: sitting on a dolly rig while looking through the camera at a shot and laughing with the gaffer at an inside joke, immediately before going into an emotional scene. That is who she is. In one second, fully alive as Saoirse Ronan, teammate and goofball, and in the next, melting into another life."

"I still don’t know how she does it, but I am thrilled every time I get to sit down and watch her become yet again." –Greta Gerwig

Bilge Ebiri (TFF 2024): "Nora Fingscheidt’s potent and visually sumptuous drama stars Saoirse Ronan as a woman both existentially and physically submerged. Fingscheidt and Amy Liptrot adapt Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of addiction and recovery into the story of Rona, a young biologist who returns home to the Orkney islands to flee her troubled past and to regain a sense of herself. But even in relative isolation, a stable, quiet life eludes her. As Rona researches the flora, fauna, and mythology of the Orkneys, while also dealing with her own troubled family, she begins to see herself as a wayward essence—lost in both the spiritual fog of the city (seen in dreamy flashbacks) and the heady, windswept immediacy of life on the coast. Ronan, who also produces the film, offers one of the most commanding performances of her career, portraying a complex, adrift character whose restlessness is matched both by the inventiveness of Fingscheidt’s immersive filmmaking and the wildness of the ocean that surrounds her." –Bilge Ebiri (UK-Germany, 2024, 118 min)

AA: Nora Fingscheidt's The Outrun is the second film I see from her, after the extraordinary Systemsprenger / System Crasher (DE 2019), one of the greatest movies of that year and with Helena Zengel in the most powerful performance of the year with Joaquin Phoenix in Joker.

The Outrun is based on an acclaimed book, a recovery memoir by Amy Liptrot, set in Orkney and dealing with rehabilitation from alcoholism.

The magnificent landscape of Orkney, the power of the Scapa Flow and other forces of nature, such as the vicinity of communicative seals and the elusiveness of the corncrake, put human things into a larger perspective.

Saoirse Ronan, one of the greatest talents of her generation, takes new challenges as Rona, based on Amy Liptrot, whose story is a combat against forces more formidable than furies of nature. She strips all glamour and enters the heart of her character and life among the elements.

However, The Outrun does not grow into one of the cinema's unforgettable accounts of alcoholism, and Saoirse Ronan's performance is not an immortal portrait of an alcoholic. Perhaps Nora Fingscheidt did not find the right spark abroad, perhaps Saoirse Ronan failed to connect with the inner life of an alcoholic.