New film by Nora Fingscheidt in the cinema – “The Outrun”: In the Maw

The big city can eat you up whole if you’re not careful. These constant temptations here and there and everywhere, when you should actually be concentrating on something with a professional future. The distractions are difficult to ignore, especially when you’re young and don’t really want to know where life is taking you. That’s what Rona, the main character in Nora Fingscheidt’s third feature film “The Outrun” feels like. Rona (Saoirse Ronan) is lost in London. She left her home, the remote Orkney Islands in the far north of Scotland, to study biology in the big city. Like any young person hungry for life, she throws herself into the colorful, rowdy party world, into which she then disappears as if into a chasm. But we’ll find out about it little by little.

The film begins in the breathtaking nature of Scotland, rugged, moody, merciless. The waves of the Atlantic lash up the massive rocky coast of the Orkney archipelago. Rona has returned to her homeland, the main island of Mainland, because London spat her out like unsavory chewing gum. Rona is just a shadow, her movements mechanical, her lust for life buried under a pile of empty beer bottles. Massively addicted to alcohol, Rona thinks that after withdrawal she will be able to cope again if only here with her family.

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The film cleverly and with high-contrast cuts weaves together the different worlds that are revealed piece by piece: sober and drunk. The third level is Rona’s poetic observations of nature, which in no way seem artificial, rather contemplative, and are interspersed from the off.

Rona helps her father on the sheep farm, gives birth to lambs, feeds them and sits on the cliffs during breaks with headphones and blaring techno music on her ears and in the next scene basically watches herself crashing in some London club. The different temporal levels are best recognized by Rona’s changing hair colors and how they grow out.

Fingscheidt has a soft spot for female characters who are stuck in existential struggles with themselves. Her debut film “System Sprenger” (2019) also tells about a girl beyond what the world considers normal. And Rona also says about herself: “The edge is where I come from. The edge is my home.”

The nature shots, which Fingscheidt shot on the Orkney Islands at three different times (during lamb births, bird nesting seasons and seal mating seasons) are in stark contrast to the hedonism revealed in the London sequences. Rarely has a film dealt with the topic of alcoholism and the longing for healing using such a strange contrast.

And her various inner demons constantly wrestle with Rona, which are woven into the story in a well-balanced way, which is thanks to Fingscheidt’s extremely disciplined script work. From the novel of the same name by journalist Amy Liptrot, who deals with her own addiction and life story in the book, Fingscheidt extracted different levels using different colored highlighters, which she reassembled for the script so that they made more sense for the film medium.

Rarely has a film dealt with the topic of alcoholism and the longing for healing using such a strange contrast.

In addition to Rona’s alcohol addiction, an increasingly complex life unfolds. Rona, who grew up with a mentally ill father and a mother who sought support in religion out of loneliness, fled the island out of love for life, like probably few people before her. Fingscheidt, who wrote the script together with Liptrot, portrays the island residents not as narrow-minded loners on the edge of the world, but as tradition-conscious but warm-hearted and caring people who do not see Rona’s departure as a betrayal, but who see it as a sign of trust. that she is looking for protection and security here again. A long-time island resident gives her the best advice in the fight for abstinence: “It will never be easy, it will just be less difficult.” And by the way, without any moral impetus, it is shown that alcohol takes an immense number of people with it.

With “The Outrun,” Fingscheidt creates an extremely complex treatise about the most difficult thing in life: survival. The visual aesthetic is reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s epic “The Tree of Life”, only “The Outrun” is much more accessible and not sacred to the point of nerve-racking.

The plot is simple because alcohol always tells the same stories of a person’s decay and eventual dissolution, but Fingscheidt and Liptrot create a very special energy by switching between the different phases of Rona’s healing story. At the beginning the film is incredibly hectic and feverish, London is colorful and loud, Orkney is gray, blue, uncomfortable. Only when Rona retreats to a bird keeper’s house on the very edge of the already remote island of Papa Westray so that she is no longer exposed to any temptations does the film come to rest. Nature, which already plays a prominent role, becomes the main character of the film. At some point towards the end, and this is perhaps the only flaw in the script, the switches between retrospect and present become redundant. The diabolical nature of Rona’s London life is clear here at the latest and nothing fundamental is added to it in the tenth flashback.

In the end, however, the film manages to tell a moving story of family, recovery and security thanks to a clever script and the fragile and explosive presence of Saoirse Roman, which is also thanks to the camera work by Yunus Roi Imer, with whom Fingscheidt already worked on »System Sprenger « worked together to have an extraordinarily intense effect.

»The Outrun«, Germany/Great Britain 2024. Director: Nora Fingscheidt, script: Nora Fingscheidt/Amy Liptrot. Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Paapa Essiedu, Stephen Dillane. 119 minutes, start: 5.12.

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