Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Stephen Dillane, Saskia Reeves, Paapa Essiedu
Review by Carol Allen
Ronan plays Rona, who returns from a chaotic and booze ridden life in London to the islands where she was born and bred in the hope that the peace and solitude will help her find her true self again.
The story telling is non chronological, moving around in Rona’s memories and her present – a device which is at time confusing but is helped by the character’s habit of changing her hair colour, which helps us know where in her life we are – blue for when she’s boozing, blonde with the colour growing out when first home and orange when she’s settled back into her childhood environment, all enable us to follow the somewhat chaotic nature of the narrative, reflecting that same chaos in her boozy past and her struggle to find peace and purpose.
Ronan is excellent in the role, embracing the extremities of the character’s drinking life and the contrast with herself when sober and struggling to stay so. The cold, wet, majestic scenery of the sea and the islands and the watchful and watched seals is all beautifully shot, as indeed are her scenes of alcoholic excess.
Paapa Essiedu plays her boyfriend and partying companion in London, Stephen Dillane and Sakia Reeves her parents, who presumably have played a role in their child’s later often horrifying, self-destructive behaviour. And to be fair, life in the Orkneys isn’t all gentle peace and light. It can be brutal too, as we see or example in a scene where Rona helps with the birthing of a lamb.
Much of the material though is well trodden ground, with its scenes of alcoholic and sexual excess and AA meetings and despite the unusual emphasis on the healing power of nature, which makes it different from other films about alcoholism, it didn’t for me throw any new light on the oft trodden cinematic ground of addiction and recovery
But Ronan is terrific in what could well be an award winning role for her.
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