At The Movies: Saoirse Ronan triumphs in The Outrun, Bagman is a forgettable fright

The Outrun (NC16)

118 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on Oct 17
★★★★☆

The story: Saoirse Ronan stars as 29-year-old recovering alcoholic Rona, who retreats to Scotland’s Orkney Islands of her birth to complete her rehabilitation.

Every addiction drama is a slow climb out of rock-bottom despair towards light. American-Irish prodigy Ronan – aged 30 and already a four-time Academy Award nominee for Atonement (2007), Brooklyn (2015), Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019) – makes the well-worn trajectory an absorbing journey.

The Outrun, co-written by German director Nora Fingscheidt (System Crasher, 2019) and Scottish journalist Amy Liptrot, is based on Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same title.

Rona, 117 days sober, has returned after more than a decade away in London. She had found freedom there in clubbing until her drinking destroyed her promise as a biology graduate student and her relationship with her boyfriend (Paapa Essiedu).

Fragmented memories of those ugly benders cut into the non-linear narrative like hazy hangovers.

Life back at her family’s sheep farm presents its own conflicts. She scraps with her religious mother (Saskia Reeves), worries over her bipolar father (Stephen Dillane), and is lonely and disconnected.

Her solitude amid the archipelago’s windswept sandstone cliffs and cerulean waters gradually calms her soul. The landscapes are awe-inspiring, and her interactions with the remote rural community – she volunteers with an ornithological society to survey endangered corncrake birds – are among the best moments for bringing out Ronan’s naturalism.

From introspective delicacy to drunken fervour, the star-cum-producer runs the gamut of emotions on an odyssey of healing that is hopeful yet also a constant, terrifying struggle against relapse. Rona learns to overcome, one day at a time.

Hot take: Not that anybody needs reminding, but Ronan proves herself the finest actress of her generation.

Bagman (NC16)

93 minutes, opens on Oct 17
★★☆☆☆

The story: Young father Patrick McKee (Sam Claflin) again confronts his childhood bogeyman when the evil entity returns to threaten his family.

The eponymous creature known variously as El Kuko in Spain, Torbalan in Bulgaria or, simply, Sac-man, is an undead reskinned troll of ancient lore that snatches children and zips them up in his rotting bag to feed on their dying energies.

Two questions for the American psychological horror Bagman.

First, how did McKee, a victim, escape and survive two decades into the movie’s present day? Second, does Scottish television director Colm McCarthy (Peaky Blinders, 2013 to 2022; Black Mirror, 2017) not think such a plot hole would nag at the audience?

But poor McKee. His career has fallen apart. Financial difficulties compel him and his wife (Antonia Thomas) to move back into his suburban boyhood home in New Jersey. Bagman (Will Davis) soon reasserts itself in his nightmares and by scattering mementoes from their long-ago encounter around the house.

It is coming for his three-year-old son (Carell Vincent Rhoden) this time.

McKee is like any new parent in the role of family protector. He struggles against the pressure and self-doubt, even if his fear is nothing short of his deepest trauma and his enemy is supernatural.

He sacrifices all in the name of fatherly love.

Very touching of him, but the story, while grim, is thin and often makes no sense.

Hot take: This forgettable fright flick would embarrass the namesake monster.