The Outrun (15)

Saoirase Ronan gives one of her greatest performances as a young woman grappling with addiction in a moving and delicate adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir.

Rona (Ronan) has a familiar pattern of despair and renewal – broken relationships, destructive blackouts and blistering hangovers. Derailed by alcohol at age 30, she returns to Orkney, an archipelago of about 70 islands in the north of Scotland where she grew up, to find herself in sobriety.

She has a fractious relationship with her religious mother (Saskia Reeves) and tries to keep herself busy with a job that involves spotting rare bird.Flashbacks accumulate like the bottles on Rona’s floor. There’s a familiar dread to her descent, as she confuses the repetitive loop of benders with freedom, extremity with living, and lashes out at anyone who tries to ground her.

Even at its most sentimental, there’s something bracing about the film’s consistent lean toward the symbolic – in a genre often geared toward strenuous, grimy realism. A thought provoking and sobering watch, and a continued example of why Saoirase Ronan is one of greatest living actresses.