The Outrun: masterful Saoirse Ronan [critique]

The actress impresses once again in this intense and tortuous portrait of a young woman trying to escape her alcohol addiction.

Everything starts from an autobiographical story. That of Amy Liptrot, a Scottish woman who, after years of excess in London where she became addicted to alcohol, undertook a harsh, chaotic, exhausting 90-day detoxification treatment on the archipelago of the Isles of 'Orcade, which she chronicled in a novel, covered with prizes when it was published in 2016. Eight years later, here it is brought to the screen at the initiative of Saoirse Ronan who made her debut as co-producer on the occasion and therefore chose the one who directs it, Nora Fingscheidt, revealed in 2022 by Benni, heartbreaking portrait of a 9-year-old girl rejected by her mother. A particularly inspired choice because the director takes hold of this story by dynamiting it, exploding its programmatic side through two major, perfectly complementary movements.

A game with the chronology of events, through the memories that go back to the memory of its heroine and a way of representing the evolution of her distorted vision of the world by mixing archive images and animated sequences, while leaving ample space to the wild nature of this island and the ancestral legends that surround it. Fingscheidt constructed this fiction as a kind of exciting experimental documentary because it never seeks to make its heroine sympathetic. But none of this would work without a genius actress, capable of playing all the nuances of her character, of being as impressive in excess as in the expression of intimate pain. And Saoirse Ronan is made of this wood.