Don’t try to Outrun the stormy new trailer for Saoirse Ronan’s addiction recovery film

We’ve seen an endless number of films about addiction and recovery over the years, but The Outrun promises something a little different. That’s mostly because The Outrun has Saoirse Ronan in it, but come on… it’s four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan we’re talking about here. She could make a movie about cardboard stand out from the crowd.

Besides, The Outrun does look gorgeous. The 2024 Sundance film released its first U.S. trailer today, giving the rest of us our first glimpse at the hazy blues and greens, blunt cliffs, and frigid waves that dominate its cinematic landscape. The film’s whole aesthetic, including Ronan’s constantly changing hair color, looks like it could have been ripped straight from a Phoebe Bridgers music video, but that—at least in this writer’s opinion—is certainly not a knock. 

Ronan plays Rona (this writer giggled too), a woman who moves back to her rugged hometown in Scotland’s Orkney Islands after leaving London, where she was in rehab for alcohol addiction. “Sometimes you can feel a vibration in Orkney—a low rumble that takes over the whole island and every part of your body. But there is only so much height any way can sustain before it comes crashing down,” Ronan narrates in the opening of the trailer, which seems to presage a film that will be taut and joyful in equal measure. 

Produced by Ronan, The Outrun was adapted from Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name. Liptrot and the film’s director, Nora Fingscheidt, wrote the screenplay. It also stars Paapa Essiedu, Saskia Reeves, and Stephen Dillane.

Speaking to Deadline earlier this year, Ronan called the film’s subject matter “a topic I had been daring to explore for quite a while, because it was something that was quite personal to me.” While she’s never suffered from addiction herself, “people very close to [her] have.” In the end, she said it was “incredibly cathartic” to make the film.

The Outrun is currently slated to premiere October 4 in theaters.