Saoirse Ronan is in that rarified class of actor that can make you forget that there’s a screen between her and the viewer. That guards-down acting style, striking as early as Atonement (2007), the tragic wartime romance that netted her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod at 13, is the reason to see Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun, an addiction drama whose formal finickiness can undermine its emotional power but never the resonance of Ronan’s typically astonishing work.

The movie is based on a 2016 memoir by Amy Liptrot that I haven’t read. Ronan, a ringer for a young Vanessa Redgrave, plays a version of Liptrot named Rona, and she starts the film at a low: physically forced out of a bar where she gets fall-down drunk, then attacked by a stranger who offers a ride home. Twenty-nine, unemployed, and with an incomplete master’s in biology to her name when we first meet her, Rona’s path to recovery engines The Outrun. It’s a winding, unpredictable one, as susceptible to the small triumphs of a sobriety milestone as a relapse and working in tandem with efforts to reconnect with her ecological passions in the remote, gale-wind-prone Scottish archipelago where she grew up. 

Read the full review at 425.