De Volta ao Mar

If you are fan of the very adaptable Saoirse Ronan then you'll probably love this - she throws just about everything into the role of "Rona". She has returned to her mother's home in Orkney to recover from a fairly torrid time of booze and drugs in London. The timelines are threaded together to drip feed us the causes of her current predicament whilst looking at her own efforts to get - and stay - clean. Of course, there are domestic issues at home too with her father suffering from bi-polar disorder and her mother having turned to religion which add to the turbulence of her life. In the end, she takes a job working on a remote island for the RSPB trying to find an example of the once plentiful but now rare corn crake. With the weather closing in on her small cottage and her determined to get well again despite the familial pressures, the woman has her work cut out for her. Can she stay the course or is a relapse inevitable? It is a strong effort from Ronan here, and Andrew Dillane also delivers quite effectively as her dad - especially once the film has got up an head of steam and the characters more fully develop. The photography of this sometimes beautiful and other times bleak environment adds really well to the overarching sense of the claustrophobic as the story plays out. Her self-imposed isolation flying in the face of her naturally more gregarious personality. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the treatment techniques and struggles involved here, but it does provide us with a powerfully character-led drama that must have cost a fortune in hair dye and doesn't offer any rose-tinted solutions.

I don't know what to make of this film. It feels simultaneously kind of moving and dull. Maybe I had high expectations that were too high. Before watching the film, I'd read several reviews about how amazing, raw, and transcendent this film was. So, while watching, I kept waiting for something big or truly searing to happen, but that never came. So when the film ended, I thought to myself, "Is that really it?" This could've been so much more disturbing and visceral than it was. There is so much unwarranted hype around this film. It's meandering, unengaging, and uninvolving. The film could've been darker and more cumbersome, thus packing more of a wallop.

Don't get me wrong here. It does have some strengths. While watching, I was enamored with Saoirse Ronan's acting. She truly shines here in a powerhouse performance that's equal parts explosive and subtle. But great acting and cinematography don't make a great movie if the writing is tenuous and unengaging much of the time, as is the case here. At times the film is intoxicating and sobering. And at times it's jejune and tedious. There is no real plot here. Much like the lead character, the film itself is quite aimless. We pretty much just follow a young woman dealing with alcoholism and how that affects people, and that's pretty much it; not much really happens.

I know the film is based on a memoir, and in that format, the travelogue moments work. But on film, it's very jarring to jump from scenes of seeing a young woman in the throes of alcoholism to pictorials of Orkney animals and landscapes. This happens multiple times throughout the film. It just felt really strange and unnecessary. The same thing happens with the random moments of Rona narrating about the island's mythological history feels odd and arbitrary. The narration in general doesn't add much to the film.

The editing really sullies the film. The pacing is mediocre, with some parts of the film interesting and moving, and some parts of the film really slow and boring. There are random jump cuts and things are told out-of-sequence to the point that it's confusing. The change in Rona's hair color is apparently used as a device for the audience to understand where in time she is, but it doesn't help much. The film is supposed to be grounded, poignant, and touching, and it does sometimes feel that way, but much of the time isn't really. It feels kind of cold. The few surreal and lighter scenes of Rona conducting the sea and the weather, of her swimming amongst the seals, of her in a rave that only turns out to be a memory, and of her acting like she's riding a ship when in reality she was in a building overseeing the sea, were interesting and fun.

The film is worth checking out, albeit I'm sure some will find it dull. The acting is great. I mentioned Ronan, who will likely deservedly receive an Oscar nomination for her performance in this, but Stephen Dillane and Paapa Essiedu are also standouts. The cinematography and the film's use of lighting, punctuated by the landscapes and the contrast of the urban London versus the bucolic Orkney, is beautiful.

It's not often that I leave a cinema feeling inspired by a film. The Outrun is one such movie. I have always been an advocate of the healing power of the natural world and watching this beautiful, but sometimes harrowing film, reinforced my philosophy. Sometimes the best stories are the simple ones and this is one of them. Saoirse Ronan produces and stars as the main character Rona who was bought up on the Orkney Isles, but hankers for the bright lights of London like so many other young people from isolated communities often do. The film does well to portray the pitfalls of living in a big city, but also deserves credit for showing the Orkney Isles as a clearly beautiful, but sometimes desolate place. In the same week I have also been to see two big budget films, but the Outrun was by far the best of the three albeit on a fraction of the budget. If you want to see a film that will make you feel more positive about life then I recommend you see this movie. I am glad that I did.

This movie deftly takes the viewer on a journey to loss and addiction and back again in two intertwined stories - past and present that slip along next to each other, each revealing themselves, piece by piece. Saoirse Ronan's performance embraces both stories with utter conviction. She ably backed up by a small but brilliant cast. At times, you could believe you were watching a 'fly on the wall' documentary, the characters were so unassumingly true to life in their portrayal of the London and Orkney roles. The parents were particularly well played.

Finally, the backdrop. Orkney in winter contributed so much drama and atmosphere.

Recommended.

A beautiful film with some fantastic acting, particularly from Ronan. At times, I was a little lost in what was going on to begin with, but that resolved itself for me as the film went on; I believe that that was a deliberate reflection of the confusion and displacement felt by Rona, the main character. Others may not agree with my 9 rating, but I have read and enjoyed the book 3 times now and I think that doing so helped me enjoy the film. I feel that this is a fine distillation of the human story in the book into a near 2hr movie. The focus is on the battle with alcoholism being fought by Rona and because of that, the much more extensive portayal of Orkney and its natural environment in the book was necessarily significantly reduced. A beautiful film that requires concentration.