If you missed The Outrun when it played in theaters last Fall, after premiering at Sundance, you may watch it on Netflix as of March 17. See trailer.
Saoirse Ronan stars in the film, directed by Nora Fingscheidt from the 2016 memoir by Amy Liptrot, and also produced it with her husband, Scottish actor Jack Lowden.
It’s a strikingly spiritual movie about a young Scottish woman living in London and struggling with alcohol addiction, who eventually manages to achieve sobriety and happiness by returning home to Scotland and living alone surrounded by nature in the remote Papay, Orkney Islands.
Ronan, born the Bronx, New York, to Irish parents and raised in Ireland, was nominated by BAFTA as Best Actress for The Outrun. She had been nominated to both Golden Globes and Academy Awards for Atonement (2007) directed by Joe Wright from the 2001 novel by Ian McEwan, for Brooklyn (2015), for Lady Byrd (2017) and Little Women (2019) both written and directed by Greta Gerwig. In 2018 he journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press awarded her a Globe as Best Actress in a comedy for Lady Byrd.
I interviewed this outstanding actress several times, wrote long profiles for the Italian magazines Best Movie in 2018, and Voilà in 2021.
I mentioned her work in Ammonite (2020) costarring Kate Winslet in my Cultural Weekly article about Lesbian Romances.
In 2024 Ronan also played a mother searching for her young son lost in World War II London in Blitz, written and directed by Steve McQueen.
During our virtual interview last October, the actress said that she built the intricacies of the dynamic between mother and child from her own relationship with her mom (Monica), she was very inspired by that. She added that usually, when watching film or TV about the Second World War, you are instantly transported to a very male dominated environment, because that’s where the drama is happening. But Blitz explores what life was like for hard-working women during that time.
When we met on zoom last November to talk about The Outrun, Ronan confessed that the subject of alcoholism and addiction affects everyone, it’s completely universal and relatable. That it touched her life in a deep way growing up, it shaped who she is, how she views the world and deals with conflicts. And she was now ready to process that pain properly in a healthy and productive way.