29/41
Rona: I Can’t Be Happy, Sober
Line of Events
After living a life on the edge in London, Rona tries to come to terms with her troubled past. In the hope of healing, she returns to the wild beauty of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, where she grew up. Based on Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name.
One with the Wind by John Gürtler and Jan Miserro
If you’re a fan of the highly adaptable Saoirse Ronan, then you’ll probably enjoy this one – she gives her all to the role of "Rona". She returns to her mother’s Orkney home to recover from a rather grueling time of booze and drugs in London. The timelines are intertwined to fill us in on the causes of her current predicament while also looking at her own struggles to get – and stay – clean.
Can she stay the course or is a relapse inevitable?
Of course, there are also domestic issues at home, with her father suffering from bipolar disorder and her mother turning to religion, which add to the turbulence of her life. She eventually takes a job on a remote island for the RSPB, trying to find a specimen of the once abundant but now rare corncrake. As the weather closes in on her small cottage and she is determined to get well again despite family pressure, the woman has her work cut out for her.
Her self-evident isolation flies in the face of her naturally more gregarious personality
This is a big effort from Ronan, and Andrew Dillane delivers quite effectively as her father too – especially as the film picks up steam and the characters develop more. The photography of this sometimes beautiful and sometimes bleak setting really adds to the overall sense of claustrophobia as the story unfolds. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the treatment techniques and issues that arise here, but it does provide us with strong character-driven drama that must have cost a lot of money to dye its hair and not offer any rosy solutions.
