THE OUTRUN now on Prime
Saoirse Ronan’s latest movie THE OUTRUN is now available to watch from home. Based on a memoir by Amy Liptrot about addiction and recovery, Saoirse Ronan delivers a touching and powerful performance as Rona, a young woman returning home to the Orkney Islands of Scotland attempting to restore her life.
Ronan does not rely on showy exaggeration or wild swings for her craft. Her most acclaimed roles — in FOE and LITTLE WOMEN — all feel, at least from the outside, as if they tap into some part of her real self. All four are intelligent and perceptive and plucky and just a little innocent, in need of some hard-knock wisdom. Yet they’re all indelible, and all very different from one another: girls and women for whom life is a good, hard mystery to be lived and then understood.
The director Nora Fingscheidt wrote the screenplay for THE OUTRUN with Amy Liptrot, based on Liptrot’s 2016 memoir. In the film, Liptrot has been transformed into Rona, a 29-year-old woman who, when we first meet her, has a black eye, having been nearly defeated by life. She’s from a tiny village in the Orkney Islands, which lie off the northern coast of Scotland. Rona went to London to earn a graduate degree in biology, where she met friends and a man she loved. But a latent propensity for addiction turned into a full-blown alcoholic spiral, and she wrecked her life completely.
