Saoirse Ronan Conquers ‘The Outrun’, Delivers Her Sharpest Performance Ever – Annenberg Media

Sundance Film Festival – Saoirse Ronan plays her most expansive role yet in “The Outrun,” a film that relies entirely on the lead to take the audience on an intensely personal journey. Amy Liptrott, author of the book on which the film is based, helped refine the script, along with director Nora Fingscheidt and Ronan, who produced (along with Jack Loden). The trio chose to change the lead’s name to Rona to help give them all some “healthy distance and creative freedom,” but the story is rooted in Liptrot’s intimate truths.

We first meet Rona in a voiceover in which she explains an important part of Irish folklore: the story about people who, when drowned and lost at sea, turn into seals. These human-made seals called selkies come ashore at night and dance naked. They are free and wild at night, but if a man sees them, they are unable to return to the sea. They become disaffected on the ground, stuck in a world where they don’t belong.

Then we see Rona dancing, face sparkling with jewels, blue haired and ecstatic. She is at a club with a lover, both swimming in electronic music and dripping with sweat.

We experience shock at a different moment in time. Under fluorescent lights, she is alone, drinking a beer as a bartender, with whom she seems familiar, begs her to leave. What begins as a friendly request – “We’re closing, it’s time to go” – turns into a violent confrontation as she is restrained. She is an aggressive drunk, a mess.

The metaphor is profound. Rona is a selkie trying to make her way back to the ocean. But he could not turn back because the sea was killing him. Rona is an alcoholic who has lost the life she loved and is forced into a new life, which she now finds joyless.

Ronan admitted in an interview with the Sundance Institute: “I don’t think even three or four years ago I would have been psychologically prepared to take on this kind of role. I wouldn’t have been secure enough in myself. I wouldn’t have been secure enough as an actor to feel brave enough to face someone whose ugly parts we see constantly throughout the film.

To capture these drunken nights in the most authentic way, the team brought in choreographer Wayne McGregor. Saoirse explained that “they wanted to see how Rona moves when she’s drunk, but a fun drunk, and how she’ll move when she’s really drunk and messy drunk, and how she’ll move when she’s sober and sober and nervous. A lot of work was done on how she would act. . How she would move on with her boyfriend versus her father. All these different scenarios to give me an awareness of how to hold this character in my body at different stages of her life, so that it was for me. The biggest way was.

Fast-forward and Rona has left London to spend some time in recovery, living with her estranged parents who work on the farm where she grew up. Her father (Stephen Dillane) suffers from bipolar disorder and we slowly begin to understand how much it has affected her life, how much she has in common with him. Her mother (Saskia Reeves) has turned to religion, a path that has brought her much peace, but alienated her from the rest of the family.

Fingscheidt deftly tackles the film’s complex timeline: using Rona’s hair color to help the audience establish the different periods of her life. She evokes different memories of the film and Rona according to her emotional state. At the beginning of the film, scenes move from one to another in a way that is fast and jarring. It is difficult to grasp them, almost as if we are drunk ourselves, moving mindlessly from one room to another of Rona’s memory.

About this approach in an interview for the Sundance Institute, Fingshed explained: “There are three layers to the story: the Orkney layer, which is gray and bluish and greenish; The memory layer, which is colorful and pink and orange and the extreme opposite, so the two are connected; And then London becomes more distorted and out of focus and you see the color drain from it, while Orkney opens up and becomes full of life.”

The strength of “The Outrun” is its ability to understand the layers of addiction and the uphill battle one must fight within themselves to get to the other side and find any kind of peace. A character tells Rona about the process: “It’s never easy… it gets less difficult.”

The film is a simmering excavation. It can be monotonous as we trek with Rona on her nightly search for the call of the corncrake bird, an endangered species. For much of the film, Rona is antisocial and uncomfortable in her skin. Her insecurities are palpable and her distaste for the others in the small town where she now lives is palpable, and her unhappiness is palpable. It is easy to understand why she is alone. It’s hard to imagine her any other way. But as we dive into her various memories of when she first fell in love, spent her days in the biology lab, scored effortlessly without studying too much, rode bikes with her friends and laughed freely, we We understand her. Pain in a more subtle way. “I can’t be sane,” he admits at a point in the film that we, as the audience, begin to draw a picture of.

The profound thing about this film is that the human experience, addict or not, is full of this kind of internal conflict. To be truly happy, we need to work hard. We all experience trauma in some capacity, and if we numb ourselves from understanding our limitations, we eventually end up in a depressive or regretful state. But “working” is extremely challenging and frustrating. Finding a quick fix is ​​pretty easy; Delete and ignore. Addicts who are trying to recover are stripped of all their crutches so suddenly and painfully that it feels like they have to rebuild their entire existence from scratch. How does one feel joy again when so much of their social life was fueled by liquid courage? How does one deal with their shame and have nothing to hide behind?

Rona is connecting with nature. As a biologist, she has what Fingshead calls a “nerd layer,” which she also described in the same interview with the Sundance Institute, as a crucial element of the book that needs to be portrayed on screen: “It’s the most intimate. Inside Rona’s head. insight and her perception of the world.” Bringing inner monologue from a book into a visual medium without losing its impact can be difficult, but here, Fingscheidt uses archival footage and animation to unpack these complex concepts and “nerdy” diatribes. And because of the aesthetic choices made in this montage, it worked. What Ronan finds most surprising is that humans share 60% of the same DNA as jellyfish, for example.

Through these elements, we learn factual and historical information from Rhona, but we also gain a more layered understanding of her as a person: her logical and scientific approach to life.

“The Outrun” is one of the films of the festival that is not easy to shake. The details and monotony connect us so deeply to the character that every small victory feels won. We become him, in a sense. We feel her struggle and therefore, we also feel her joy after jumping into the icy waters of the Northern Sea, or the hope that comes with feeling passionate about something after years of disillusionment.

It’s a beautiful film in every sense of the world and Saoirse Ronan, just 29, proves once again that she is one of the best working actors today.

The film looks cathartic and intelligent. It shows, not tells, the transformative power of healing — through the wildlife, the ocean, the expansive cliffs that seem like abysses. Healing powers of wind and strong fire. The metamorphosis that comes from moving through one’s pain and the strength that metastasizes from the little things: lighting candles, dancing to music, cooking your favorite meal.

These small moments, these small victories, are what make life.