General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Outrun

The Outrun is a 2024 drama film directed by Nora Fingscheidt, adapted from Amy Liptrot's 2016 memoir of the same name. It stars Saoirse Ronan as Rona, a young woman who returns to the Orkney Islands of Scotland after rehab to recover from alcoholism, and it was produced by the United Kingdom and Germany in English.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Source	Adaptation of Amy Liptrot's 2016 recovery memoir The Outrun; screenplay by Fingscheidt and Liptrot, from a story they wrote with Daisy Lewis¹^•³
Cast	Saoirse Ronan (Rona), Paapa Essiedu (Daynin), Saskia Reeves (Annie), Stephen Dillane (Andrew)⁴
Premieres	World premiere at Sundance Film Festival 2024; European premiere at the Berlinale Panorama; UK premiere as Opening Night film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024⁵
Release	UK and Ireland cinemas 27 September 2024; North America 4 October 2024; streaming on Netflix UK⁵
Runtime and rating	117 minutes (Berlinale listing); rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language and brief sexuality¹^•²
Reception	82% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 161 reviews; Metacritic metascore of 72; US gross of $865,900⁴^•⁶
Awards	Nominated for two BAFTA Awards in 2025, Outstanding British Film and Best Leading Actress; Ronan won the BAFTA Scotland Award for Best Actress⁷

Spoilers

Story and adaptation

Rona, a 29-year-old biology student, has spent years in London struggling with alcoholism. After hitting bottom she goes through rehab and returns to the Orkney Islands, where she grew up, to rebuild her life among a windswept landscape the film treats as both punishing and restorative.²^•⁸ Her family life is strained: her father Andrew (Stephen Dillane) is bipolar and sometimes has to be hospitalized, and her mother (Saskia Reeves) is a devout Christian whose proselytizing has long angered her. In London her alcohol abuse damages her relationship with her boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu).⁸^•⁹ Back in Orkney she takes a post-rehab job with an ornithological preservation society monitoring the endangered corncrake population, and eventually settles on the smaller island of Papa Westray.¹⁰^•¹¹

The film departs from the memoir in one deliberate way: Liptrot, Fingscheidt, and Ronan decided to rename the protagonist Rona, after an uninhabited island visible from Liptrot's family farm, to create psychological distance from the real-life subject and allow fictional elements into the story.¹¹^•¹² Ronan also serves as narrator, speaking words drawn from Liptrot's memoir, and the script makes frequent use of fantasy and whimsy, at points veering into animation.²

Structure. Fingscheidt tells the story non-linearly, cutting between Rona's childhood, her downfall in London, and her return to Orkney, with asides on the islands' history and folklore. The film opens underwater with a seal in the North Sea, invoking the selkie folklore of Orkney, drowned souls that take seal form in the water and shed their skins on shore.¹¹^•¹³ Rona's progress is marked by the changing colors of her dyed hair, coral-pink, sea-green, and aquamarine in her chaotic London days, and a blazing chemical orange after she returns north. The Sight and Sound review reads the shattered chronology as a formal argument: each jangling pivot to the London past signals the risk of an intrusive thought, showing that rehabilitation never follows a smoothly curving story arc.¹⁰

Production

Producer Sarah Brocklehurst pursued the adaptation for years after Liptrot's memoir was published in 2016, and the project accelerated when actor Jack Lowden gave the book to his partner Saoirse Ronan, who had read and loved it independently. Ronan joined as producer alongside Lowden and Dominic Norris of Arcade Pictures, with Brocklehurst's Brock Media also producing; Fingscheidt was brought on to direct after finishing The Unforgivable (2021).¹⁴^•¹¹ The film was made with the support of BBC Film and Screen Scotland, in co-production with Germany's Weydemann Bros and Studiocanal; Screen Scotland's Film Development and Production Fund contributed £500,000.¹⁵^•⁵

Filming commenced in Orkney in late 2022, shooting in Liptrot's own house, and the production returned to the islands four times across a year to capture the seasons: lambs being born in April, birds nesting in June, the main shoot in September when the seals were present, and a small winter unit for snow. On Papa Westray the weather was at times too calm, requiring a wind machine on set.¹⁴^•¹⁶ Ronan learned lambing for the role, and the production could not afford wigs, so hair and makeup artist Kat Morgan used clay to dye Ronan's hair in the hues that distinguish the timelines.¹⁶^•¹⁷

Release and reception

After its Sundance and Berlinale premieres in early 2024, the film opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival and was released in UK and Irish cinemas on 27 September 2024 and in North America on 4 October 2024 through Sony Pictures Classics, later streaming on Netflix UK.⁵^•⁴

Critical response centered on Ronan's performance. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus calls the film "a moving portrait of addiction in spite of its somewhat shapeless narrative," and the Guardian's Sundance review described Ronan as giving one of her greatest performances in a moving, delicate adaptation.⁴^•¹⁸ The Associated Press review called her performance transcendent and noted that she is onscreen virtually every second.² Not all critics agreed on the filmmaking: Richard Brody in The New Yorker found the rapid cutting rushed and the telling constrained, arguing that the film fails to convey the importance that writing held in Liptrot's recovery.⁸

At the 2025 BAFTA Film Awards the film was nominated for Outstanding British Film and Ronan for Best Leading Actress, and Ronan won the BAFTA Scotland Award for Best Actress; the film also received a Panorama Audience Award nomination at the Berlinale.⁷ In North America the film grossed $865,900 in limited release.⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2023 and 2024 › Titles O to Y

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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