I got suckered by the location (the Orkneys!) and Saoirse Ronan. She's done some great work with Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women) and Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel) but that's less true of her more recent stuff (Foe, and by all accounts, Blitz). It would've helped to know that this movie was based on a memoir by Amy Liptrot of her hard-days'-nights in London: it would've explained why the interstitial voice overs were so pretentiously literary, so incongruous with the gritty scenes of lamb birthing, partying in nightclub toilets and grim ferries. The title is mentioned by the character's father as a location in the vicinity of his farm but is mostly leant into as a motif for addiction.
The direction by Nora Fingscheidt is generally poor. The cinematography often aims for realism with the odd burst of impressionism but is mostly drab. The hand-held stuff made me feel like David Stratton. The closeups drove me nuts. The chronology is so scattershot (which I usually take to mean the story is too weak to be told straight) that I couldn't track how it fitted together despite carefully noting Ronan's hair colour in each scene; by about halfway I realised there was no payoff in the details, and that we're far from the gentle, quixotic, closely-observed and forgiving humanity of Andrina and Greenvoe. I did not enjoy the music (mostly EDM, some incidental chamber stuff, the odd bout of industrial).
The story has Ronan's character hit the booze hard in London while she studies for a PhD in some kind of biology. Why she does this is hard to discern, as is the character of her boyfriend and fellow lab rats. (We learn so much more about a self-identified crackhead father she shares a brief scene with at the drying out facility. This reinforced my sense of poor filmmaking.) After her life comes apart we're shown that her father has severe brain chemistry issues as a limp-wristed explanation alongside a mildly anachronistic and daft community life in the Orkneys.
Things proceed as they must. She spends a lot of time alone; this did not strike me as being what she needed. Her expressed sentiment "I'll never be happy when sober" shows what she's up against, and we know that her rehab is complete when she starts to smile at the closing Gyro festival, making eyes at and having a one nighter with a new young man, white this time.
This movie adds nothing to the addiction canon. The arc is almost purely solipsistic; compare with the communitarianism of My Name is Joe. It's far too earnest, too completely humourless, to go up against the big boys like Trainspotting and Michael Clune's White Out. (There's barely a sniff of a sex scene here and it is very solemn. The fact that the AA program worked for her but not always for everyone goes unacknowledged.) I guess those who dug Requiem for a Dream might endorse it.
Richard Brody was unimpressed. Entirely without risk. The source material is far superior. Dana Stevens on recent leading-lady performances. Ronan is fine but that only makes it worse.
