I couldn’t hold back the tears through the ending of this film. It ends with a magnificent crescendo of hope that I found profoundly beautiful and poignant, and then, as the credits roll, the first notes of The The’s This is the Day starts to play and I dissolved.

Co-produced by Saoirse Rona, directed by Nora Fingscheidt and based on an autobiographical book of the same name by Amy Liptrot, Ronan plays Rona, an Orkney girl with a mishmash of an accent due to her English parents. She is living in London and getting wasted most nights. She’s an annoying kind of drunk, going limp when the barman tries to carry her out and then getting stroppy and abusive.

The story is given to us in a non-linear manner, effortlessly shifting timelines between Rona as a child, getting drunk in London, at rehab and afterwards in Orkney trying to stay sober. We can tell the time frame by the level of dye in her ombre hair. London is long-suffering boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Esseiedu), growing tired of her lack of responsibility, and Orkney is her disapproving mum (Saskia Reeves), father Andrew’s (Stephen Dillane) windswept sheep farm and isolation to keep her away from temptation.

There’s no great dramatic arc in this, just a person trying to make a change in their life and with her past and present woven together in a tender portrait. Ronan is excellent, getting under Rona’s skin so we feel the struggle and see the moments of catharsis and change. The Orkney islands play a strong part in illustrating the pains and pleasures of your homeland and the healing power of nature. 

We are seeing the story from Rona’s point of view and so the people around her, her parents in particular, are rendered in two dimensions – bipolar dad and religious mum – until Rona herself emerges from her self absorption to see them as whole, complex people.

This was my second film in a row about how childhood trauma can emerge as addiction in adulthood but where Hoard immerses us in the grubby, sticky pain of hoarding, The Outrun blows it clean with Orkney gales.