Saoirse Ronan is this year’s first Oscar contender

Johnny Oleksinski

Movies

Sundance Film Festival

By Johnny Oleksinski

The first potential Oscar contender of the year — well, for 2025 — is Saoirse Ronan as a tortured alcoholic who seeks refuge in nature in “The Outrun.”

The actress is courageous and raw, and doesn’t overplay a single second like many praise-hungry actors in addiction films.

Director Nora Fingscheidt’s tough drama, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is based on Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name and plays an emotional role for Ronan, who is at his best playing a character at a crossroads.

This is the cry of Londoner Rona, who grew up on the remote Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland and turns to alcohol to soothe the open wounds of her past.

She’s a terrible drunk – the kind who spills everyone’s leftovers at last call and then kicks and screams when she’s angrily asked to leave.

Rona usually puts herself in dangerous situations and never remembers what she did or said the night before.

Fingscheidt tells the woman’s story in a disorganized, non-linear manner that claustrophobically mimics an alcoholic blackout. Dates and details are vague: from when she goes to rehab, to the point at which her relapse occurs, to the day she moves back to her parents in a sparsely populated town.

However, on the beach, the cry – and the film – begin to gain clarity.

For him, home is where the healing is, but it is also the root cause of his problems. Rhona’s father, Andrew (Stephen Dillon), has bipolar disorder, so she grew up with an unpredictable and often absent father. His mother, Annie (Saskia Reeves), abandoned him and now runs her farm alone while Pop lives elsewhere on the property.

In rocky Orkney, the cry is simultaneously calm and anxious. For city dwellers, wide-open landscapes provide a different kind of claustrophobia. She also misses her ex-boyfriend Denin (Papa Essiedu), who was fed up with her drunken behavior and hollow apologies.

But Nora is determined to get better with the help of an even more difficult-to-access island, rare birds, accepting locals, and self-belief.

I will admit that I have addiction-movie fatigue. Of course, movies about substance abuse have been made for decades, but lately, there’s been a glut of them, especially about the opioid epidemic. There was “Ben Is Back” with Julia Roberts and “Beautiful Boy” starring Timothée Chalamet. A few years ago at Sundance I saw the premiere of the terrific “Four Good Days” starring Mila Kunis and Glenn Close. Many of them praised the made-for-TV formula.

To its credit, “The Outrun” takes a different path, preferring to shock us with imagery — sometimes sickening, sometimes breathtaking — rather than sob-filled speeches. Thinking back, it is a very quiet and lonely film.

It’s an unprecedented performance for Ronan, who dares to be inappropriate for a rare time in his career. Her natural charm and eccentricity, which we’re used to from “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” is just a twinkle in Rhona’s eye – and it’s that little twinkle that makes the audience connect so strongly with this troubled woman. Live.

Ronan’s performance will certainly be a topic of discussion in the coming months.