“The Outrun,” the story of a 29-year-old Scottish girl within the throes of, and restoration from (although not essentially in that order), an more and more determined alcoholism, is a drama with numerous issues going for it. It stars Saoirse Ronan, an important actor who, nobody might be shocked to listen to, lives inside this function as if she’d occupied it her entire life. The movie is predicated on Amy Liptrot’s 2017 dependancy memoir (the heroine is now named Rona), and the German director Nora Fingscheidt (“System Crasher”) adapts it in a somber, meditative, structurally free-form manner that’s all about damaged surfaces and moods of fragmentation and despair (and mutating dyed hair).

A lot of the film is about on the Orkney Islands, a distant archipelago positioned within the Northern Isles of Scotland and steeped in folklore. This gorgeously extreme panorama — the black rocks, the waves, the end-of-the-earth barrenness — is offered as such a head-on analogue of Rona’s interior state (her desolation, her isolation, the traditional mystic connections that would save her) that you could be end up pondering again to when this type of factor was poetic in Ingmar Berman motion pictures.

But even Bergman, for all his asceticism, had an austere interior drama queen. By itself unvarnished, metaphoric, diary-of-destruction-and-renewal phrases, “The Outrun” is competent and even stylishly made, but I’ve to admit: I discovered the film overwhelmingly drab. Every part that occurs feels particular (at the very least visually), but in addition a tad generic. The movie leaps round in time, which is all good, but it by no means acquires any ahead momentum as a story. Our empathy, and curiosity, preserve crashing up towards the rocky shoals of enervation.

Each overview of an dependancy film now has to incorporate some model of the Paragraph About Habit Motion pictures. So right here goes: Sure, on some degree they’re all the identical, as a result of the patterns of dependancy are the identical, so the actual difficulty is whether or not the film in query distinguishes itself within the feelings and particulars, the sense of this occurring to a person. “The Outrun,” in a notable manner, positions itself forward of that syndrome. It virtually appears to embrace the cliché-ness of a lot of what we’ve seen in dependancy dramas, as if to say, “Nothing new right here. And nothing too ‘juicy.’ Simply distress. However behold the sentiments.”

Rona grew up on Orkney, however a lot of the movie takes place after she’s moved to London, the place she’s coaching to be a biologist, and the place we see her dancing like mad at EDM golf equipment, throwing up on the road, displaying up with a black eye, flaking out of her lab research, being deserted by the doting boyfriend (Paapa Essiedu) who can’t take it anymore, and standing on an empty street with no manner dwelling, as a voice barks out of a automotive pulling as much as her, “Hey, you want a elevate?” (That she would get in that automotive tells you ways far gone she is.) However the director’s angle seems to be: Right here all of it is, the stuff you recognize about, let’s not dignify it with dramatic italics. Even when Rona arrives at a 12-step program, the second isn’t handled as pivotal. The entire level of the leaping round in time is that it’s the movie’s manner of trying not on the jumbled journey of an addict however on the single sustained journey of a spirit who occurs to be caught within the throes of dependancy.

However all that continues to be somewhat summary. For anybody who noticed “To Leslie,” the Andrea Riseborough drama about alcoholism that grew to become one among final yr’s buzzed-about Oscar sagas, there have been loads of issues in that film you’d seen earlier than — drunken tantrums, the violence of a celebration woman hitting the skids — but Riseborough made you are feeling such as you had been discovering them for the primary time. You at all times felt the hazard of her character, which is a factor with drunks; they are often collateral wrecking crews.

I used to be riveted all through “To Leslie,” whereas the 118 minutes of “The Outrun” stretch on in a manner that grows repetitive and numbing. I feel that’s partly as a result of Ronan, beneath the meticulous dangerous conduct, doesn’t utterly challenge the starvation which may have pushed Rona to it. It’s as if the filmmaker thought that will have been too typical, however what we get as an alternative is much more typical: spiky scenes with Rona’s bipolar father (Stephane Dillane), who was taken away throughout a breakdown on the day she was born, and her overly pious Catholic mom (Saskia Reeves). (Her father did return, however that’s how unstable and in-and-out the scenario was.)

Fingscheidt, fairly cleverly, makes use of the size and exact dye job of Rona’s hair to tell us the place we’re within the story. The hair is full-on aqua when she’s in full alcoholic cry; it’s that coloration solely on the suggestions, melting into blonde, when she’s making an attempt to depart these days behind; and it’s sunburst orange when she’s blooming within the desolate but Edenic pure fairy-tale world of the Orkney Islands. Addicts are at all times on some degree remoted, and dependancy dramas are usually about how they transfer towards others. At moments that occurs right here, as in Rona’s reference to the crusty island retailer clerk who can spot a fellow addict a mile away.

However in one other sense she must withdraw even additional. That’s why she’s come to Orkney ­— it’s surrounded by water, nevertheless it’s the last word place for a dry-out, for meditative nights in a spartan cabin submerged within the blackness. One can simply see how therapeutic a setting like that will be, particularly when you’re meditating on seals. Are the seals, often known as selkies, actually reincarnations of the useless? As somebody who wished to love “The Outrun” however couldn’t hook into it, I’ll go away it to others to search out that query fascinating.