Heart-wrenching story adapted from Amy Liptrot’s memoir is as tough as its Orkney landscapes
The title means an outlying coastal piece of farmland on Orkney; it is not suitable for cultivation, but so continually windswept with Atlantic spray that its grass stays short as if naturally tended, and so functions metaphorically in various ways. It could be a wholesome, bracing, healing place for troubled city dwellers; or a place whose restorative quality is an illusion, a place every bit as violent and mysteriously destructive as the city; or it could even somehow stand for the actual person who has come there, the low-functioning addict, shaped and flattened by forces all but impossible to outrun.
Saoirse Ronan is outstanding in this painful, involving addiction-recovery drama, directed by Nora Fingscheidt and adapted by Fingscheidt and Amy Liptrot from Liptrot’s own 2017 memoir of the same title and co-produced by Ronan with her husband Jack Lowden. Ronan plays Rona, a young woman born in Orkney who has been living in London as a postgrad student, where her joy in her freedom has been succeeded by alcohol abuse and depression. Her relationship with the tender, caring Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) is poisoned by her toxic addiction and she gets into a terrifyingly vulnerable and violent situation.
