Amy Liptrot’s memoir, The Outrun – about recovering from the alcoholism that took over her life in London in her twenties by returning to the Orkneys where she had grown up and embracing the natural life of the islands – looks ever more a masterpiece as time goes by. It is exceptionally well written, describing chaotic and painful experiences with remarkable clarity and directness, engaging with the wild life of the islands with an intensity that makes most nature writing seem footling.
When The Outrun was published in 2016, it was immediately admired. It won the Wainwright Prize for nature and travel writing as well as the PEN Ackerley Prize, and sold more than 100,000 copies in the UK. This summer, it was adapted – heaven knows how – for the stage at the Edinburgh Festival, without Liptrot’s involvement. Now the film version is here, scripted by Liptrot with the director Nora Fingscheidt (who has made documentaries and two feature films, System Crasher, about a violently disruptive nine-year-old girl, and The Unforgivable, in which Sandra Bullock plays a woman released from prison after serving 20 years for murder). Saoirse Ronan stars and, with her partner, Jack Lowden, co-produces.
Making a drama from such a specific memoir, one so intent on its own authenticity and so well expressed in its own medium, is a dicey business. Do you stick to every documented detail or do you adapt freely? Fingscheidt named the lead Rona, not Amy, to provide some “creative distance and healthy freedom” for all, but otherwise remained faithful to the book – at the cost of not having much propulsion in the narrative.
Rona’s story is presented in three phases, intercut as memory dictates. There’s her hapless life in London’s Hackney, partying and drinking herself into aggression and oblivion, repulsing her reliable boyfriend (I May Destroy You’s Paapa Essiedu). There’s her newly sober life in Orkney, time spent with both her separated parents: her bipolar farmer father (Stephen Dillane) and her evangelical mother (Saskia Reeves, who is particularly good). But there is also much time on her own – on the cliffs, by the shore and in the sea. As a navigation aid through these chopping and changing eras, her hair changes colour, dyed an electric blue in London, growing out as she perseveres in abstinence, ultimately becoming an orange flame of assertion. There are also flashbacks to her childhood and the family troubles that remain with her.
The filming is almost documentary in style, close-up and reeling in the London scenes, calmly taking in the landscape in the Orkneys, the editing changing pace to fit Rona’s mood. A great part of the film’s appeal, as of the book itself, is how vividly it transports you to these remote, windswept, sea-pounded places, all filmed in situ. We see wonderful seals. A terrific surging score by John Gürtler and Jan Miserre picks up the sounds of the storms and the waves, to make a rhapsody, startlingly distinct from the drum and bass Rona loves.
The dialogue is humdrum, perhaps improvised – “I can’t do this any more,” says the boyfriend inevitably, breaking up with her – and there’s a lot of voiceover directly from the book, too, some of it fanciful: “High on fresh air and freedom on the hill, I study my personal geology. My body is a continent… when I orgasm, there’s an earthquake.”
Ronan – whose astonishing face at times resembles a carved, gothic Madonna – is excellent throughout, always edgy, never making herself easily likeable, always isolated. “Watching the film, I feel that she makes a better version of me than I do,” Liptrot has humbly said.
She is oddly not sexual, though – there’s an absence. “A lot of nature writing is quite chaste, so I wanted to put the sex in nature writing,” Liptrot has said. In The Outrun she emphasises that her love of nude wild swimming is cathartic, offering transformation and escape, like intoxication: “I am so thirsty and full of desire.” Rona favours a one-piece. Likewise, Liptrot recounts taking off all her clothes and running round the Ring of Brodgar stone circle one midsummer dawn: here, it’s just an affectionate night-time hug from Rona.
Having somehow to wind up, the film ends with a mightily orchestrated climax, Rona alone, enraptured, conducting the wind and the waves, entirely at one with natural ferocity, an over-the-top scene that failed to enrapture me. The Outrun almost makes a great success of an improbable adaptation. In future, the book will no doubt bear Saoirse Ronan’s features on the cover, but still show us Amy Liptrot’s true face inside.
“The Outrun” is in cinemas now
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history