To tell an addiction story is to traffic in cliche. It’s “always a story that has already been told”, writes Leslie Jamison in her addiction memoir The Recovering, one that comes down “to the same demolished and reductive and recycled core: Desire. Use. Repeat.” Recovery relies on its own well-worn platitudes – rock bottom, one day at a time, “I’m X, and I’m an alcoholic.”
The Outrun, the German director Nora Fingscheidt’s mesmeric adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir, accepts such trite foundations as a point. Rona, played by a never-better Saoirse 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 northest north of Scotland where she grew up, to find herself in sobriety. She is not the first to start this journey, and she won’t be the last.
