Part rehab memoir, part travelogue about the wildlife and crashing waves of the Orkneys, Amy Liptrot’s 2016 book The Outrun won prizes and rave reviews, because Liptrot was gesturing to grander horizons than her own personal redemption.

Saoirse Ronan says it was vital that her new drama “The Outrun” remained true to the memoir it’s based on by Amy Liptrot. Liptrot captured her life as she moved to an extremely remote, tiny island in Scotland to try to maintain her sobriety after reaching rock bottom in her life.

The crashing of waves, the somber recrimination of chilly charcoal clouds: for the young woman at the center of this story, Rona—played, in a marvelously nuanced performance by Saoirse Ronan —these are both markers of time and reminders that sometimes it’s necessary to temporarily drop out of time,

Saoirse Ronan “really fell in love with how Amy [Liptrot] wrote about her home, how poetically she described her memory of growing up in the Orkney Islands, and balanced that so beautifully and so effectively with the raw honesty of her struggle with addiction.

In the opening of The Outrun, a young woman named Rona (played by four-time Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan) shares the legend of the selkie. Through a dreamy voiceover, she explains how these mythological shapeshifters of the sea could come ashore at night,

An alcoholic (Saoirse Ronan) returns home to Scotland's Orkney Islands and achieves sobriety in nature's solitude.

Is that really Saoirse Ronan playing a blackout drunk with a violent temper, scraping rock bottom as she staggers into a London pub at closing time, eager to slurp down leftover drinks and kicking and screaming when a bartender drops her in a gutter?

The Outrun is meditative & often poetic, with a powerful, emotional performance by Saoirse Ronan. It's not without pitfalls, but it's a strong debut.

Whenever a participant speaks at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, they introduce themselves the same way. The participant states their name, and then confesses, “I am an alcoholic.” To the outsider, such repetition might seem self-defeating.