British Film Fest 2024 Review - The Outrun
Images courtesy of The British Film Festival.
According to Orkney folklore, when people voluntarily surrender to the sea, they become seals. As selkies, they return secretly at night and shed their seal skins to regain their human form to dance, but, If they are seen in this form, they become stuck, forced to live their lives unhappily on land, yearning for the sea.
Rona recites this folklore through a voiceover at the onset of the film, and while they aren’t mentioned again, there are visual manifestations throughout the film that tilt us back into the ocean - Rona rediscovers her love for biology through studying seaweed and plunges into the Arctic waters towards the end, connecting herself to the selkies and folklore she speaks of.
The majority of The Outrun places us in Orkney, a remote archipelago in the Northern Isles of Scotland where Rona (Saoirse Ronan) grew up. The islands are steeped with mystical folklore and the friends and family she left behind when London-bound. The severe landscape, barren farmland, crashing waves and her own imagined control of the weather inherited from her father, breathe life into Rona’s inner turmoil and set the path for her journey of recovery from alcohol addiction.
Ronan never fails to execute a stellar performance, and The Outrun is no exception to this. The Outrun is based on Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name, and adapted for the screen by Nora Fingscheidt (known for her 2017 film System Crasher). The sombre and fragmented tone of the film, as well as the mismatched non-linear timeline lend themselves to providing deeper insight into Rona’s life and her struggles with all-consuming alcoholism and the recovery in progress. It is becoming rarer to see new distinctive cinematic styles within feature films nowadays, and Fingscheidt achieves her visual storytelling through colour and textures that shroud Rona's memories and perspective. The characterisation of Rona herself, and the passage of time, is marked through her ever changing hair. These benchmarks start with her turquoise hair, which hair and makeup artist Kat Morgan uses as a direct link between Rona and Liptrot, mirroring the turquoise hair that Liptrot herself once had. The rest of the colours are used to mark moods and emotions, as well as different stages of her recovery. The turquoise was used as a homage to the skies and seas of Orkney, Rona’s childhood home, also acting as a contrast to the severity of the grey London locations. While all of the other colours of her hair are relatively bold, lessening as she moves through time, the end of the film shows Rona dying her hair orange, perhaps symbolic of a new start - as cliche as it may sound, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. While some may argue that the use of hair colour as a signifier of time is cliche and overdone, we need to remember that The Outrun was filmed on a rather small budget in comparison to other films of its nature.
Overall, the film gives way to a delicate and thought provoking adaptation, with an uninhibited showcase from its protagonist.
The Outrun played in select cinemas as part of the British Film Festival 2024 (6 November - 8 December 2024). For more info, or to book tickets to an encore screening, click here.