The Outrun Is A Tortuous And Punishing Attention Grabber

Sometimes pain can be productive, especially in cinema where suffering often engenders creative fodder. In German writer-director Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun, based on a screenplay she co-wrote with Amy Liptrot (whose memoir is the foundation of this deeply disturbing film), the redoubtable Saoirse Ronan plays an alcoholic struggling with her demoniacal addiction.

While Rona struggles with her addiction, we the audience go through our own struggle to stay with Rona, experiencing every bit of her self-abasement, watching her fall apart in scenes that are emotionally and physically violent.

We first meet Rona in a pub where after getting massively drunk she refuses to leave. She is pushed out, kicking, dragging, and screaming… Uh oh! This isn’t going to be an easy watch. You instinctively know the director Nora Fingscheidt is not going to let her protagonist off the hook easily.

Saoirse Ronan loves making complex characters look easy. Here it isn’t that simple. She enters Rona’s head and stubbornly scours her inner world looking for one redeeming beam of light and fails. Finally we leave Rona trying to sort out her tangled life to the best of her abilities.

Watching Rona grappling with her invisible monsters is like trying to make sense of a jigsaw where pieces were deliberately left out.

“I am unhappy when I am sober,” she tells her sympathetic but frightened friend.

This is not a true confession. It is a mirror moment of Rona’s irreparably damaged inner world. Of course, Saoirse Ronan projects Rona’s trauma with a subtle skill that makes her performance seems supremely spontaneous. But we know this is not easy and that multiple rehearsals must have gone into making Rona’s character a throbbing hurting wounded slippery entity.

The film is shot like a shaky drowning ship with all the passengers on dread alert. Yunus Roy Imer’s cinematography is splendidly suitable. Even the sea (the series is set in a Scottish village) is raging tumultuous and uninviting, echoing Rona’s insatiable quest for freedom from her inner demons.

But I am afraid after watching one murky manifestation of a nihilistic life after another, The Outrun felt like misery porn. There is too much self-inflicted misery, too little hope. It might be a faithful echo of facts. But cinema needs to fuel melancholy with hope.

There, The Outrun fails. The sense of spontaneous sorrow towards which the film works so diligently, seems at some level rehearsed and infertile. Sure Saoirse Ronan is likely to get an Oscar nomination. The entire film endeavours to rush in where angels fear to tread, to an create awards-worthy dread. Nicolas Cage made drinking look frightening on Leaving Las Vegas. Ms Ronan just makes it look ugly.