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Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun (2024) offers a moving depiction of an addiction recovery at the very brim of life.

An essay by Noëlle Jaene Feldmann

For two hours, we’ve come to witness a spectacular breaking of waves. The tipping point after the highest of highs. A fall almost anticipated, almost pleasurable. Where do we witness this comedown? By the ocean, of course. Although they collapse in different manners, there is only so much height any wave can sustain before it comes crashing down. This is Rona’s voice, protagonist of Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun. It uses this grandiose natural phenomenon, accompanied by visualisations and audio track of sea and storms, to describe – well, everything.

As a longtime admirer of Saoirse Ronan’s diverse performances, a huge fan of Fingscheidt’s System Crasher (2019) and a flora and fauna enthusiast, my expectations for The Outrun were high. Seeing, but even more so hearing the water masses crash onto the rocks, I knew the equation had checked out. Force of the elements, tides of life. A freckled Ronan in frequent close-ups, carrying her character’s pain in her gaze and posture, and her ups and downs in the changing colors of her hair; these help the viewer through the non-linear temporality of the storytelling at the same time as they come together to symbolize Rona’s shifting mental states. The turquoise or pastel pink of Rona’s excessive party times in London have grown out by the time she arrives in the countryside – small relics of former toxic glory clinging on stubbornly in the tips of her hair; and then they’re gone. What remains is a dull blonde that is but a mere echo of the dark blonde hues of Rona’s childhood. The hair feels empty now, an in-between color, anticipating the next high, a high that will arrive eventually in the form of flaming orange, a powerful image of a strengthened Rona.

Knowing this was an addiction story, I expected it to be heavy. Yet what hit me most was the struggle preceding, and most likely evoking Rona’s alcoholism; for in many ways, this is not just another rehabilitation narrative. It is, in retrospect, a story about being alone. About feeling alone regardless of who’s around you; about a literal solitude brought about by life on a remote piece of land; and about the fear of loneliness, which is almost worse than the feeling itself. When Rona’s London boyfriend (Paapa Essiedu) leaves her after another one of her intoxicated tantrums, she falls into a despair that surmounts each of her previous struggles and culminates in sexual assault. Although she is in no way responsible for the attack, the act of getting in a stranger’s car in the middle of the night is a final cry for help. She knows that whatever will happen to her will be severe enough for her ex to stop ignoring her messages. Indeed, Daynin arrives at the hospital, and Rona must face the truth that he will not return to her. It is then that she enters the rehab facility and, eventually, moves back to her childhood home on the Orkney Islands.

The decision for sobriety is matched with a return to nature. Amy Liptrot’s memoir, the basis for Fingscheidt’s script, indeed reads as a powerful work of nature writing. Rona chooses isolation as a remedy for loneliness, a beautiful paradox which will reveal itself to be a wise choice. Yet she must first struggle to fully settle into the island’s community again. Her awkward attempts to make friends only confirm her status as an outcast and she falls into a liminal state of indefinite waiting that finds its narrative climax in the job she takes with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Rona’s task of surveying and monitoring the endangered corncrake has her spending long and silent hours in anticipation for its elusive, frog-like call, a call that is only heard in the final second of the movie. Even though the corncrake’s eventual call is predictable – waiting and listening for it plays a significant part within the narrative – it brings relief nevertheless, albeit with a comedic rather than symbolic side effect. The bird image and Rona’s “hair of fire” almost suggest a phoenix motif turned slightly campy by her outburst of glee. Yet to end on Rona’s laughter is a liberating move away from the film’s preceding sorrows.

For Rona’s return to the place of her childhood years reveals, naturally, fragments of her past life, and with that, a possible origin cause for that interiorized sadness. We see Rona’s loneliness reflected in her parents, who are separated and raging their own silent wars with solitude. The mother (Saskia Reeves) seems distant and disconnected from her daughter yet shares every detail about Rona’s addiction with her prayer group. Her devotion to Christianity is met with much ridicule and scorn by both Rona and her father. All that praying didn’t help, did it?, a relapsed Rona sobs to her mother while tearing Christian images off the walls of her flat, unable to see that her mother’s praying is, like so many other things, not directly tied to her. At times, it was difficult, the mother will say at the end of the movie. Until I found God. Or rather, God found me, and it becomes apparent that religion, like alcohol, is but another escape from a life too lonesome.

Meanwhile, Rona’s father (Stephen Dillane) is the epitome of existential dread and has failed to build a life that can accommodate his bipolar disorder. Instead, he’s left utterly alone, a sheep farmer pained with insanity who distorts the archetype of the reliable shepherd. In tune with this paradox, it is he who gifts Rona a compass, as if to say: don’t follow me, find your own right way.

Chasing high after high is the life Rona knows, and it has made her sink lower and lower. The movie’s title comes to mind. “To outrun something” can mean to run/travel faster or further than, escape from, go beyond or exceed. It is not a contradiction to say that Rona has done all of these things, on a deeply physical level,  both in her addiction and in her recovery. The literal outrunning of life in moving your body towards the rim of land, in going as close to the edge as possible, opens up a push-and-pull between body and mind that cannot find compatibility, one always outrunning the other. The chase is stopped, in the end, not just by decelerating, but by changing the fuel. A new set of questions seems in order: Rona moves from the more limiting “what controls me?” to the liberating “what can I control?”. I had to think of another Scottish nature writer, Nan Shepherd, who writes about the Cairngorms in The Living Mountain (1977): “To aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain.”

To Rona, the present image of her father lying motionless on the bed, unable to show the slightest sign of life, is both a haunting from the past –we witness almost the exact same scene in a flashback from Rona’s childhood– and a frightening glimpse into her own potential future. It is when faced with this fear of the future that Rona relapses, after a moment of horrid knowing that painfully displays the alignment between self-destruction and addiction. But Rona does not become her father. She moves to an even more secluded island and forces herself to face life from an entirely new standpoint. Isolated from the human world, she then becomes part of Scotland’s raw nature and suddenly finds herself operating under new laws: daylight, or the absence thereof, cold, but most crucially – wind. The howling, whistling, and wailing become the symphony of an indomitable force, the sound of untameability, only temporarily blocked out by the contrasting electronic music from Rona’s headphones. Yet music and wind coexist without fusing, drowning each other out in turns and competing for the viewer’s attention. In a flashback from Rona’s childhood we see her father tear open all the windows to let in a storm of destructive magnitude. She’s crouching under the table, watching as her mad father is being taken away. She used to think he could control the wind; a striking confession, for it implies that she thinks her father uses his special powers to wreak havoc.

All three themes – wind, music, and special powers – come together in a culminating moment, as Rona achieves what her father never could: standing before the ocean, she conducts the waves like an orchestra, becoming a part of the currents rather than controlling them. Having arrived at this level of harmony, excess – the very thing that drew her so far out of society – reemerges in a new, more intense form: nature. This turns excess and seclusion into excessive seclusion and replaces Rona’s extravagant lifestyle of addiction to affirm that: yes, extremes do exist eternally – in nature.