"The Outrun" Is a Movie About Recovery Everyone Should See

"The Outrun" is a powerful film about addiction and the healing role of nature.

Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Key points

• "The Outrun" is a film about addiction and recovery through a woman's experience.
• It is a film that combines nature writing with arresting memoir.
• The film is about the competing and complex feelings that people in recovery may experience.

I stumble into the tiny bathroom stall of the rep theatre, less to pee and more to think about how to contain the other water that needs to flow after seeing The Outrun, a new film about addiction and recovery.

Once the car is running, I plug my phone in and feel the immediate "ah" release when music by The National starts playing.

I am good, I am grounded… I keep feeling smaller and smaller…I need my girl.

A few more Stop signs and about four more traffic lights to go. They disappear quickly, and as I walk up the three steps of my front porch, I begin feeling anxious. How will I release the tumble that has been inside of me ever since I purchased the movie ticket five days ago?

Am I ready? Are we ever?

One voice asks: How can we love people who do things they know are hurtful to themselves and others? Another voice asks: How can we demonize people for partaking in substances that are ritualized during social celebrations and life passages held dear?

The man who toasts his daughter at her wedding or someone’s first legal beverage.

There are so many in-betweens. The first swampy cocktails we sip from plastic containers. The ones made from tiny bits of liquid—usually a half-inch or so—siphoned from bottles in a parent’s liquor cabinet. Vodka dances with rye and maybe scotch if the parents are fancy. We gleefully consume the liquid in neighborhood playgrounds or upstairs bedrooms.

Ours is a culture that celebrates those who drink to excess, although this is usually reserved for men. Men in their 80s with girlfriends as young as their grandchildren who prance across the stage to thousands of fans who weren’t even born when they first got their start. Rock-and-roll is an institution, and booze (and drugs) are a central part of why they’re adored.

Their excess is rebellion. It’s a "f--k you" to what we’re supposed to do. It’s pushing the limits of the very limited boxes that are thrust around us all the minute we’re pushed into this world.

What people don’t understand is that it’s the same for those of us who were either born into the tangled nest of alcoholism or who grew into it. We’re also flailing out here, rocking and rolling in the wind and in the black bog of ourselves.

In the heavy afternoon light and the endless nights, we run, and we scream.

We are saying something, too.

Help.

I’m lost.

I don’t know how to cut myself out of this shame jacket that was tied around me long ago.

I’m terrified to live without my dark maiden, the bottle.

I want to be invisible.

Leave me alone in my sorrow

Help.

I am good, I am grounded… I keep feeling smaller and smaller… I need my girl.

The book The Outrun by Amy Liptrot was published in 2015. I read it a couple of years ago. Part nature writing, part heart-slicing memoir about addiction and recovery, Liptrot's book is captivating, courageous, and cosmic. So many pages are lit by the moon she traces with scientific precision as she makes it through day after day, and then month after month, of living without alcohol.

A stretch of earth that defies bounded definition, an outrun is part land and sea, both cultivated and wild. It’s an evocative backdrop for the story of how Liptrott finds herself anew; a story that is told beautifully and faithfully in the movie adaptation.

I’ve never travelled to the rocky outcrops of the Orkney coast and have never heard its waters gushing against the deep stone, infusing it with torrential energy. But I’ve taken a journey similar to Liptrot.

For a lot of us, getting sober requires us to go somewhere far away. Maybe not the outer rings of Scotland, but most certainly to an outpost of some kind. Whether it’s a posh rehab center or AA meeting rooms, we all crawl, run, or hide out in that cabin in the woods.

Sobriety is a place where things are boiled to their most basic elements. You learn to survive, to build something, to unearth things. Most of these things are feelings we’ve carried around in heavy backpacks for decades: resolve, fear, shame, desire, anger, denial, a flicker of love.

It can feel like we want to drain the oceans so there can be no more liquid to tempt us, so that we can make our way to the sandy shores more easily. We howl to one another, like Liptrot did with the seals, singing a song of grief only we can make out.

Seeing this film helped me clear the grief from my lens.

Slumped in a kitchen chair, I poured out tears that had been waiting for years to be let go. Recovery is like that. It’s something that’s unlocked in stages, and sometimes someone else’s experiences release the cellular floodgates.

This film is remarkable for many reasons, mainly the brilliant writing of Liptrot, who also co-wrote the screenplay. But it’s also incredible because of Saoirse Ronan, who embodies the main character with tender assurance and accuracy.

The Outrun is a movie about something I tried to hide for decades and struggled profoundly to find release from. To see it on the screen in a mainstream film is validating in a way that almost defies words. This film helps us.

It makes me think of Diane Arbus, whose arresting portraits of small people, nudists, and trans beauty queens redefined who is suitable for portraiture. What a leap for creativity and inclusion, what a way of destabilizing what “good” or “worthy” means.

What a way of giving us license to look at ourselves with the love we deserve.