Saoirse Ronan appears in virtually every frame of “The Outrun,” and it's hard to imagine this poignant but brutal portrayal of an addiction and recovery journey without her.

Blind drunk at closing time, Rona — a bright, late-20s graduate student majoring in biology — has again pushed her luck and, literally kicking and screaming, provoked the bartender into tossing her out of a London pub onto the sidewalk.

Then there’s the ways addiction bifurcates her life. Rona is deeply passionate about ecological preservation. There’s nothing more she loves than the natural world and protecting it. Simultaneously, she grapples with a disease compelling her to destroy her body.

Oscar nominated star Saoirse Ronan has admitted her new movie The Outrun wasn’t the toughest film she has made. The movie was shot on The Orkney Islands with the Carlow actress starring and producing alongside her husband Jack Lowden, who she married earlier this summer.

The Outrun follows Rona, a 29-year-old woman who moves back to her homeland in the Orkney Islands, in the north of Scotland, to deal with her troubled past. Over the last decade, she has been drowning in a pit of alcoholism, destroying every meaningful relationship and even endangering her own life.

The Oscar nominee plays a woman who returns to her hometown of Orkney to get clean following years of excess in London

Could this be the film Ronan finally wins an Oscar for? (She has been nominated four times, but never yet won.) She would certainly be a worthy winner. Hers is a full-body performance: Rona is as effervescent even in sobriety as the magnificent wilderness she has chosen as her remedy.

An emotive turn from the Irish actor is matched by Nora Fingscheidt’s fluent direction while adapting Amy Liptrot’s memoir

For Rona, played by Saoirse Ronan, it's alcohol, at least to begin with. For her mother, it's Christianity, and for her father, who oscillates between episodes of mania and depression, it's sheep farming,