Saoirse Ronan is the first contender for this year’s Oscar

Johnny Oleksinski

movie

Sundance Film Festival

TO Johnny Oleksinski

The first possible Oscar contender this year (well, 2025) will be Saoirse Ronan as a tortured alcoholic seeking refuge in the great outdoors in The Fast Track.

The actress is bold and raw, and never overacts the way so many praise-hungry actors do in exciting films.

Director Nora Fingscheidt’s gritty drama, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is based on Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name and represents an important role for Ronan, who is at her best playing characters at crossroads.

This is Rhona, a Londoner who grew up on the remote Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland and drinks to heal the open wounds of her past.

She’s a heavy drinker—the kind who downs the remains of her meal at last call, then kicks and screams when she’s angrily told to leave.

Rona habitually finds herself in dangerous situations and never remembers what she did or said the night before.

Fingscheidt tells the woman’s story in a jumbled, non-linear manner, claustrophobically simulating a drunken blackout. The dates and details are unclear: when she will go to rehab, at what point she relapses, the day she will return to her parents’ stunning, if sparsely populated, town.

By the sea, however, Rhone and the film begin to gain clarity.

For her, home is a place of healing, but it is also the root cause of her problems. Rhona’s father, Andrew (Stephen Dillane), suffers from bipolar disorder, so she grew up with an unpredictable and often absent father. Her mom, Annie (Saskia Reeves), left him and now runs the farm alone while Pop lives elsewhere on the property.

Back on the rocky Orkney Islands, Rhona was once calm and nervous. For city dwellers, wide-open landscapes induce a different kind of claustrophobia. She also misses her ex-boyfriend Dinin (Paapa Essiedu), who is fed up with her drunken behavior and empty apologies.

But Nora strives to get better with the help of an even more inaccessible island, rare birds, the acceptance of the locals and self-belief.

I admit that I have a movie addiction. Of course, there have been films about substance abuse for decades, but recently there has been an oversupply of them, especially those about the opioid epidemic. There was Ben Is Back with Julia Roberts and Beautiful Boy starring Timothée Chalamet. A few years ago at Sundance I saw the premiere of the terrible Four Good Days starring Mila Kunis and Glenn Close. Many of them succumbed to the standard formula made for television.

To its credit, The Outrun takes a different tack, choosing instead to shake us up with images—sometimes sickening, sometimes breathtaking—rather than tearful speeches. If you think about it, it’s a very quiet and lonely film.

It’s a phenomenal showcase for Ronan, who dares to be obnoxious for a rare time in his career. Her natural charm and quirkiness that we’re accustomed to from Lady Bird and Little Women is just a glimmer in Rhona’s eyes—and it’s that little light that makes the audience root for this troubled woman so much.

Ronan’s performance is sure to be discussed in the coming months.