An emotive turn from the Irish actor is matched by Nora Fingscheidt’s fluent direction while adapting Amy Liptrot’s memoir

Could this be the film Ronan finally wins an Oscar for? (She has been nominated four times, but never yet won.) She would certainly be a worthy winner. Hers is a full-body performance: Rona is as effervescent even in sobriety as the magnificent wilderness she has chosen as her remedy.

Based on the hit 2016 memoir by Amy Liptrot, The Outrun is meditative, slow-rising portrait of a young woman’s recovery from alcohol addiction-induced rock bottom in which she finds increasing solace and succour in the healing powers of nature.

The Oscar nominee plays a woman who returns to her hometown of Orkney to get clean following years of excess in London

The Outrun, starring American-Irish actress Saoirse Ronan as Rona and British actor Paapa Essiedu as boyfriend Daynin, is about when 30-year-old Liptrot tries to come to terms with her alcohol addiction after it has swallowed the last decade of her life,

The Outrun follows Rona, a 29-year-old woman who moves back to her homeland in the Orkney Islands, in the north of Scotland, to deal with her troubled past. Over the last decade, she has been drowning in a pit of alcoholism, destroying every meaningful relationship and even endangering her own life.

Part rehab memoir, part travelogue about the wildlife and crashing waves of the Orkneys, Amy Liptrot’s 2016 book The Outrun won prizes and rave reviews, because Liptrot was gesturing to grander horizons than her own personal redemption.