‘The Outrun’ is a mystifying and at times stupendous drama about addiction and making the sort of changes in one’s life which can bring about healing and closure, while also not forgetting that the penchant for regression and reoffending is a serious and even imminent one. Starring Saoirse Ronan, this is a meditative look at the reasons, often stemming from childhood, which might have precipitated an addiction to alcohol or drugs in the first place, as well as an examination of how recovery is futile without some element of rehabilitation and transformation.

Here, Rona (Ronan) is a woman in her late 20s whose drink addiction has led her to commit acts of violence and to losing her way as a postgraduate biology student and, then, trying to build her life through rehab. What this drama does well is show, through an albeit confusing timeframe and interlocking of different periods of Rona’s life, how a fresh impetus and focus on what ultimately matters to Rona is the only way she may be able to overcome the sort of depression and addiction which is, as we painfully see, something that runs in her family, with a father whom she is looking after while simultaneously battling her own demons.

Rona returns from London to Orkney, where she was born, and becomes an RSPB volunteer. Her time on the windswept island is presented as precarious and far from the innocent or tranquil place that our imaginations might conjure, and Rona is shown having to battle both her father’s bipolar condition and her mother’s turn to Christianity to assuage her own suffering. There are flashbacks to moments of Orkney mythology involving the myth of the selkie, where we are afforded a glimpse of creatures that mutate from humans into seals in one of the various intertitled sequences that offer a commentary on what we are seeing.

Rona speaks in one of her group therapy sessions about the way alcohol made her feel so happy – she acts as though she is nostalgic for an idyllic past – but the images we see, of a helpless, tormented and erratic Rona who loses her boyfriend due to her penchant for violence, paint a different picture. Rona is not short of self-awareness and is painfully attuned to the fragility of her condition while also being unable to shake off a past that keeps drawing her back in.

There is such a strong sense of place and geography in this very earnest drama which does throughout much of its two hour running time feel like a visceral take on the ability of the soul to extricate itself from a harsh and unforgiving environment, and whether we can ever truly break free from the constrictions and limitations of our pasts.