The Outrun: Review

15th October 2024

The Outrun: Review. By Sarah Manvel.

During the days of the Hays Code, mainstream American movies were not allowed to depict certain human choices because these were seen as corrupting and/or evil by certain powerful people. This was infuriating to filmmakers of course, but clever subversion of the rules became par for the course. That was possible because contemporary audiences knew how to read between the lines. The trouble is that times move on, and younger audiences watching older movies didn’t realise the elisions were there. They either thought that older movies didn’t depict sex and drugs because the sex and drugs weren’t happening, or that sensitive subjects were avoided because of old-fashioned sensibilities instead of enforced censorship.

Times have continued to change, and right now we are living in a world of puritanism and literalism. People raised under the constant surveillance supplied by smartphones fear nothing more than the loss of control, and thereby censor their own choices in order to provide themselves with the illusion of safety. The easiest example of this is in how alcoholic consumption has lessened in different age groups. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that anyone now who slides even a little out of line is judged as harshly as anyone was in Salem, Massachusetts. Thanks to social media, that judgement comes from a world of witch-hunters. This means stories of addiction must dial down the dark side and dial up the recovery angle; it’s no longer possible to be truly honest. The Outrun is a fictional adaptation of a memoir by Amy Liptrot and reveals bleakness and horror better than anyone expected it to. It’s just the nihilism on display is not that of alcoholism but of our current moment.

The plot is presented non-chronologically, which cuts Rona’s (Saoirse Ronan, who also produced) downward spiral into easily digested little pieces. Her public misbehaviours involve overenthusiastic clubbing and irritating behaviour in the pub. Privately there’s a lot of falling down as well as screaming and crying at her nice boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu). The inciting incident that leads to rehab and a commitment to sobriety is a physical attack that, reading between the lines, includes a rape, but it is all so tastefully filmed, with major elisions both in time and in action, that even a big black eye doesn’t have an impact.

After rehab Rona leaves east London for Orkney, the Scottish island where she was raised by loving English parents, her deeply religious mother (Saskia Reeves) and her mentally unbalanced father (Stephen Dillane), both of whom are only named in the credits. She gets a job protecting some endangered birds and spends a lot of time in the windy outdoors listening to pulsing club music. Metaphors about the importance of nature and the vividness of life on Orkney (in contrast with London, where Rona was a grad student, or something – money is never once mentioned) are ladled on thanks to a voiceover. And as Rona tries to pull herself together there’s a lot of time to ponder why this movie was made.

There are three reasons. Firstly, this is Oscar bait in a big way for Ms Ronan, who here is openly taking a page from the Kate Winslet playbook. Ms Winslet’s performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was clearly used as a reference, not least in how both movies use the heroine’s brightly dyed hair to keep the timeframes clear. That movie also underplayed the heroine’s bad behaviour in ways that are easy for prize committees to appreciate. In a part designed to show off Ms Ronan’s range, the scenery does a surprising amount of the heavy lifting.

Secondly, as in our society, movies find it almost impossible to hold men accountable for their behaviour. There is no such issue with women. Remember Tár? That movie stands alone in recent years as a fictional movie about a sexual predator. But what was the last movie from the point of view of a fictional male sexual predator? (Not a biopic, a purely fictional movie about a man that’s as sympathetic as Tár is to Lydia.) The reason you probably can’t think of one is because male audience members cannot stand to watch movies about men behaving badly. Not to generalise, but generally speaking they would strike too close to home. (The ugliest online argument I’ve ever gotten into was about Tár with several male film critics who said I was a deviant, among other things, for wanting movies from the point of view of a rapist. I still think their inability to engage with my point only proves it.) So a movie about an attractive young woman being a bad girlfriend and trying to clean up a sloppy personal life is more watchable than a young man doing the same. We can stand to watch a woman being held responsible for her mistakes. For a man we can hardly imagine the same.

But that is because of the final reason The Outrun was made: there is no better way for a society to reinforce its standards of behaviour than by punishing people who deviate from them. Reading between the lines, the trauma of having a mentally ill dad is what prompted Rona’s slide into alcoholism. At no point is a reason explicitly given. There’s nothing about the stress of being a permanent outsider in an isolated and remote community. Nothing about the culture shock of moving to London or how a coping mechanism might go too far. Nothing about Rona’s choice of a career path in science and whether that famously misogynistic area might have damaged her mental health. Instead, as the party goes sour, we have a woman to blame. We’re supposed to be horrified when Rona tries to steal from the bartender or falls over in her kitchen or trusts the wrong man. There’s no concept at all that her choices could be good and rational ones just taken too far. And we’re not supposed to wonder why things have gotten so far out of hand.

The earliest days of rehab and withdrawal aren’t shown; at least the wildly successful play People, Places and Things, which has a similarly exhausting portrayal of female addiction, got that right. Rona barely has relationships with anyone except with Daynin and her parents; in Wild, as Reese Witherspoon hiked the Pacific Northwest, she had the other hikers to talk to. Even when older male addicts occasionally offer wise advise, the overall impression is that Rona is alone now. When she sits by herself in the dark on the remote corners of Orkney listening for an endangered and possibly absent species, this is framed as a healthy reconnection to the natural world, instead of denial and running away. The one time Rona connects with someone her own age on Orkney, cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer filmed the nameless man touching her foot before editor Stephan Bechinger cut to a shot of a departing ferryboat. This is self-censorship of the most puritanical kind. The only surprise is that director Nora Fingscheidt, who co-wrote the script with Ms Liptrot, never puts Rona on bread and water, too. The journey here is not healing, but penance.

Of course, in the current climate, if you stray from the proper path, penance is all anybody wants. The worst thing about The Outrun is that it agrees with that assertion. Rona’s father doesn’t always look after his health and this is depicted as inconsiderate to her, instead of something awful for him. Rona’s mother does wild swimming with a club of women from her church, and it’s taken as a sign of good health and recovery when Rona, who formerly sneered at the group, begins to do the same.

Watching The Outrun feels worse than seeing a wild colt being forced to take the bit. Here the heroine must break herself because our puritanical moment demands it. Conform, or else. Weakness of any kind is a personal failing and bad judgement is unforgiveable. If The Outrun understood it was an infinite scream passing through nature it would have been a much better film. Instead it’s only a childish tantrum that has been memed to death.

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