Germany, Spain, United Kingdom

DramaBritish MoviesEnglish MoviesHollywood Movies

ScotlandAddictionBased on true storyFemale protagonistBased on memoir or autobiographyWoman directorBased on real person

Nora Fingscheidt

Saoirse Ronan, Paapa Essiedu, Nabil Elouahabi, Izuka Hoyle, Lauren Lyle, Stephen Dillane

Amy Liptrot, Nora Fingscheidt, Daisy Lewis

BBC Film, Screen Scotland, MBK Productions, Brock Media, Arcade Pictures, Weydemann Bros., Mogambo Films

NA

Rona, fresh out of rehab, returns to the Orkney Islands; a place both wild and beautiful right off the Scottish coast. After more than a decade of living life on the edge in London, where she both found and lost love, Rona – now 30 – attempts to come to terms with her troubled past. As she reconnects with the dramatic landscape where she grew up, memories of her traumatic childhood merge with more recent challenging events that have set her on the path to recovery.

Reviews:

Author: Geronimo1967
If you are fan of the very adaptable Saoirse Ronan then you'll probably love this - she throws just about everything into the role of "Rona". She has returned to her mother's home in Orkney to recover from a fairly torrid time of booze and drugs in London. The timelines are threaded together to drip feed us the causes of her current predicament whilst looking at her own efforts to get - and stay - clean. Of course, there are domestic issues at home too with her father suffering from bi-polar disorder and her mother having turned to religion which add to the turbulence of her life. In the end, she takes a job working on a remote island for the RSPB trying to find an example of the once plentiful but now rare corn crake. With the weather closing in on her small cottage and her determined to get well again despite the familial pressures, the woman has her work cut out for her. Can she stay the course or is a relapse inevitable? It is a strong effort from Ronan here, and Andrew Dillane also delivers quite effectively as her dad - especially once the film has got up an head of steam and the characters more fully develop. The photography of this sometimes beautiful and other times bleak environment adds really well to the overarching sense of the claustrophobic as the story plays out. Her self-imposed isolation flying in the face of her naturally more gregarious personality. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the treatment techniques and struggles involved here, but it does provide us with a powerfully character-led drama that must have cost a fortune in hair dye and doesn't offer any rose-tinted solutions.