Synopsis: Based in London, an alcoholic biologist takes refuge in the Orkney Islands where she grew up in order to take stock of her life.
Produced by the American actress of Irish origin Saoirse Ronan, dazzling and invested in a demanding role, The Outrun is the adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Scottish journalist Amy Liptrot. Five years after receiving the Silver Bear at the Berlinale for Benniwhere she painted the portrait of an angry little girl tossed from one foster home to another, German director Nora Fingscheidt was certainly the ideal person to tell the stormy destiny of a young woman who had lost her way.
A biologist in her early thirties, Rona likes to party in the clubs of London. But her husband (Paapa Essiedu) can no longer take her drinking and breaks up with her. Having lost her job, the young woman then returned to the Orkney Islands, in the north of Scotland, where she had not set foot for 10 years. Rona finds her bipolar father (Stephen Dillane) and her mother (Saskia Reeves), whose faith in God caused the separation from her husband. Shortly after her arrival, she was hired to find water rails, an endangered bird species. Unable to stop drinking, Rona rents a house on the small island of Papay, in the north of the archipelago, in order to take stock of her life.
Written by Amy Liptrot, Nora Fingscheidt and British actress Daisy Lewis, The Outrun takes the viewer into the whirlwind of the memory of the tormented Rona.
Memories of drunken nights, foggy mornings and painful events linked to childhood, dream sequences inspired by Scottish folklore, loose biology lessons: everything rushes at lightning speed in this story with its fragmented structure.
In order not to lose the thread of capricious temporality, the viewer must pay attention to Rona’s hair, which ranges from blonde to red, including pink and blue. And be patient… In this regard, we must salute the hypnotic editing of Stephan Bechinger.
Carried by the sometimes deafening rolling of the waves, The Outrun is reminiscent of the paintings of the romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, while the camera of Yunus Roy Imer (Benni) embraces the wild beauty of the Scottish beaches where the heroine, often exasperating, gets lost in order to find herself better. By turns melancholy, fiery and luminous, like Rona, Nora Fingscheidt’s feature film owes a lot to the talent of Saoirse Ronan.
In the room
Drama
The Outrun
VF: The gap
Nora Fingscheidt
Saoirse Ronan, Saskia Reeves, Stephen Dillane, Paapa Essiedu
1:58 a.m.