‘The Outrun’: A Tale of Addiction and Homecoming
A review of ‘The Outrun’, by Nora Fingscheidt; Sarah Brocklehurst, Dominic Norris, Jack Lowden, Saoirse Ronan; 2024.
Selkies are seal-people. In Orkadian folklore, they come to the shore to shed their skins and dance, naked, in the moonlight. But if they are spotted, they are forced to stay human forever, and so it is with Rona (Saoirse Ronan), the troubled heroine of The Outrun: she is drawn away from the waters of her island home to London, where alcohol replaces cold ocean water and she begins to drown.
Adapted from the memoir by Amy Liptrot, The Outrun tells, in non-linear fashion, the story of a young woman born in Orkney. She has travelled to London to live a postgrad student, but has soon lost her way. She parties. She parties hard. She gets so drunk that she stays past closing time, and fights the bouncer when he forces her to leave. Her boyfriend, Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) is a good man who wants to give her every chance, who sees her soulful nature. But her drunken outbursts are tough to witness and tougher still to take. Her addiction quickly poisons their relationship.
She parties. She parties hard. She gets so drunk that she stays past closing time, and fights the bouncer.
But she does have a soulful nature. She has passion, imagination, a habit of imagining herself controlling the weather, or dreaming of the many mythical creatures from the folklore of her island. Even during her wild and destructive drunken tantrums we see the human being beneath, struggling. The root of her pain is, as is almost always the case, her childhood — in particular, her relationship with her parents. Her father (Stephen Dillane) was (and is) bipolar; and due to the isolation of the family on Orkney, off Scotland, he was flown out whenever depression or mania struck. Such instability and emotional unreliability elicits the feeling that we are not quite enough, not quite worthy of love—that we can never be sure. There is a hole. And alcohol, with its relaxant-intoxicant properties, is one way to fill it up.
Rona ends up in rehab. She agrees to go back to Orkney, where she takes a job with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, trying to protect corncrake habits. It is not easy work. She must live in a tiny, freezing-cold and isolated caravan. But she has duties, too, a purpose. She is welcomed into the small, tight-knit community. And she has the space to start to come to terms with her family relations: not just with her father, from whom she has inherited a capacity for euphoria; but from her mother (Saskia Reeves), whose Christianity does not sit easily with her.
So The Outrun explores addiction, but also home, understood not just as a place but a feeling. The gloomy poet Hölderlin wrote of heimkumft and heimkehr (‘homecoming’), which describes coming to belong or ‘be at home’ in one’s own historical community or with one’s own historical people. To be at home is to be connected with people, nature, the divine. Is to be at one with—and so at peace with—the world, which is also to be at peace with oneself. Simone Weil spoke of enracinement (‘rootedness’), which concerned much the same thing: we live in exile, much of the time; and if we explore well, which is not to cease from exploration, then, as Eliot puts it, the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
The gloomy poet Hölderlin wrote of heimkumft and heimkehr (‘homecoming’), which describes coming to belong or ‘be at home’ in one’s own historical community.
We now think of addiction as more of an illness than a personal failing. Certainly, if we drink more than we mean to, we are liable to give ourselves a hard time. The line between personal agency and social conditioning, between responsibility and victimhood remains, at best, hazy. It can only be thus. We largely depend on what feels to us to be true and right in the case in question, and politics reveals quite how wide the chasm is between us in this respect. In The Outrun, what we see is someone who makes others her victim, who causes suffering, and yet whose suffering is so profound, and so understandable that no demand that she, say, show some willpower could ever seem adequate.
And yet it is in the apparent banality of duty, industry and community that Rona starts to find deliverance. Pleasure and excess, so often exalted in our culture, is shown in Rona’s case to be profoundly unsatisfying, destructive to her sense of self, and a catalyst of her decline. She takes some of London with her: she is rarely without her headphones, blasting drum and bass; and she retains her green or orange or pink-streaked locks, her piercings: the aesthetic trappings of the wild girl or boy from the city. But like all people, at all times and places, for as long as there have been people, she finds comfort and ease in a cohesive social group, in nature, and in the folklore and ritual and mystery that elicits awe and tells us what the intellect cannot.
