Review: The Outrun (2024) dir. Nora Fingscheidt

I’m no stranger to indulging in great actors performing in bad movies. (Milla Jovovich is one of my favorite actors, for crying out loud!) Watching Saoirse Ronan in The Outrun, though, is another breed of disaster voyeurism. I want to be graceful. And I genuinely hope to see the best version of every movie I sit down to see; this is something I’ve learned from fellow critic and movie lover Zaki Hasan, and it’s a lesson that has helped me to enjoy films that a more impatient viewing would have turned me away from. But even if I squint with every judgmental muscle in my body, I still don’t know what Ronan saw in the script of her newest film. The Outrun offers little more than insufferable Oscar bait (the based on a true story kind) about alcoholism only mildly sheltered by the charisma of a great screen talent.

Rona (Ronan) is a pitiful woman with an alcohol addiction. Her sickness is ruining her life, and we watch her run her relationships into the ground as she drinks herself into a low. The script, from Nora Fingscheidt and Amy Liptrot, the latter of whom wrote the memoir the book adapts, moves in and out of time, and this decision is just about the only thing other than Ronan that salvages something from the film. (It also hurts it. More on this later). In one timeline, she falls in love with a man (Paapa Essiedu); in the next, she causes him physical and emotional harm in her drunkenness and he prepares to leave her, no longer able to tolerate her destructive outbursts.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.