EIFF reviews: The Outrun | Alien: Romulus | Sing Sing | Between the Temples

Saoirse Ronan in The Outrun | StudioCanal

The Outrun ★★★★

Alien: Romulus ★

Sing Sing ★★★★

Between the Temples ★★★★

Adapted from Scottish author Amy Liptrot’s best-selling memoir of the same name, EIFF opener The Outrun takes a suitably artful approach to Liptrop’s poetic account of her alcoholism and subsequent recovery in the wilds of Orkney.

Eschewing addiction drama clichés in favour of something more expressionistic and resonant, the film - directed by Nora Fingscheidt (System Crasher) - finds Saoirse Ronan on no-nonsense form as Liptrot stand-in Rona, a 20-something PhD candidate whose youthful hedonism in London has tipped into life-wrecking dependency.

Woozy camera work puts us in Rona’s boozy headspace early on, but the film also smartly mimics the non-linear structure of the book, flashing elliptically back and forth in the timeline of Rona’s adulthood as she pieces together fractured memories of her black-out years in an effort to rebuild her life one day at a time once she’s back home in Orkney.

At first Rona submits herself to the familiar - the strained embrace of her devout mother (Saskia Reeves) and the physically demanding farm work offered by her bipolar father (Stephen Dillane) - but gradually she migrates northward, to evermore remote islands, lured by seasonal employment with the RSPB and, following a relapse, an increased need for isolation.

Always welcomed by locals who, amusingly, continually mistake her for being an outsider, the film never makes the mistake of sentimentalising island life: living there can be hard, sometimes brutal, and the roar of the wind is as loud as anything she’s encountered in London.

Ultimately it reveals itself to be a character study of someone born of extremes; someone who almost can’t help but gravitate towards them. As the film cuts between Rona’s old and new life we see the extent to which they map each other and judicious use of voice-over finds a raft of life metaphors in nature and local folklore - selkies, jellyfish, crashing waves, the elusive corncrake - that help make sense of her recovery. But the film has no interest in pat resolution, building instead to a symphonic finale that captures the euphoria of a life once again filled with possibilities.

It’s certainly a good way to start the festival, which is more than can be said for Alien: Romulus, the opening night film of EIFF’s new Midnight Madness strand. An interstitial sequel, it slots into the franchise timeline two-decades after Ridley Scott’s Alien and before James Cameron’s Aliens, but liberally borrows bits from all the films to the point where it starts to feel like a tedious act of cinematic cosplay - something amplified by its young cast’s noticeable lack of gravitas.

Led by Priscilla-star Cailee Spaeny, said cast look less like the indentured, deep-space mining contractors they’re supposed to be and more like a bunch of social media influencers running through the latest iteration of an Alien-themed VR experience. We’re certainly a long way from the grounded character work that Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt et al brought to the 1979 original, though be warned: the film goes to some dubious lengths to provide continuity with that film by resurrecting one expired legacy character and the now-deceased actor who played him.

In a cinematic space dominated by decades-old IP no one can hear you scream and the premise of this one requires its own legacy tarnishing assault on the mythology in order to put Spaeny’s character, Rain, in the vicinity of a new bunch of face-huggers, chest-bursters and xenomorphs. Along for the ride are a group of fellow wannabe outlaws desperate to escape their own bleak futures, and joining them is yet another shifty android with turncoat proclivities (he’s played by Rye Lane’s David Jonsson).

In between being picked off one-by-one, these new characters mostly deliver meme-ready dialogue and groaning call-backs to James Cameron’s best lines. They’re not memorable in the slightest, but then everything in the series feels so rote at this point that even when director Fede Álvarez does come up with something visually inventive - like a set-piece in which Rain has to navigate acidic blood spatter in zero gravity - there’s no tension.

The same goes for a last-act twist that threatens to take things somewhere interesting but swiftly devolves into silliness, bringing back memories of the rubbish Alien Resurrection. Elsewhere, the film’s efforts to expand the mythology succeed only in further demystifying it. At one point we’re told all about the physiology of the Alien: how it fuses with its host, takes control of its DNA and rapidly transforms said host into something terrible - a weirdly apt metaphor for what this film is doing to the first two bona fide classics.

Named for the titular American prison in which it’s set, Sing Sing embeds Oscar-nominated actor Colman Domingo in the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) theatre workshop programme that’s been helping Sing Sing’s inmates get through their sentences since its inception in the late 90s.

A lightly fictionalised version of a 2005 Esquire magazine article about the RTA scheme, it casts former participants as versions of themselves and lets the rawness that results go someway to offsetting and subverting the more familiar prison narratives that have hardened into movie clichés.

Subverting the corny put-on-a-show tropes of a backstage drama, however, is another matter and the film leans into the inspirational, triumph-over-adversity messaging you’d expect to find in such a tale. Yet it does so by stripping back all the stirring music and polished dialogue and giving semi-improvised scenes of the characters workshopping their latest play enough room to breathe.

Gradually a plot takes shape around Domingo’s character, John “Divine G” Whitfield, who’s doing a 25-year stretch for a crime he didn’t commit, but remains hopeful that a forthcoming clemency hearing will quash his conviction. Something of a writer too, theatre has been a lifeline, but as he’s passed over for the lead in the group’s latest production - a wild, time-travel-inflected comedy the programme’s director (Paul Raci) has concocted to keep everyone happy - he has to swallow his own pride and help the group’s newest recruit, George “Divine Eye” Maclin, prepare for a role he doesn’t yet know how to access through his own locked-down emotions.

Here, director and co-writer Greg Kwedar takes care to locate the drama not in amped-up or violent exchanges but in quieter moments of transformation that capture the way life and art feed off each other for the better.

Shot with the fuzzy nostalgic glow of a New Hollywood film from the 1970s, Between the Temples is a conscious throwback to the maverick comedies of that era too, most notably Harold and Maude, whose arch May-December plot it echoes in its story about a recently widowed synagogue cantor (Jason Schwarztman) preparing an elderly congregant (Carol Kane) for her belated bat mitzvah.

If that sounds niche, writer/director Nathan Silver’s sharp script provides Schwartzman with a role rich in throw-away one-liners and he responds with a performance full of wry humour and suppressed heartache, bouncing delightfully of Kane, whose face (like Shwartzman’s) is frequently captured in glorious close-up, the complexities of their off-kilter bond writ large amid the kvetching relatives and synagogue hierarchy trying to set Schwartzman’s Ben up with the (secretly kinky) daughter of the local rabbi.

Boasting some of the same unexpectedly ribald energy of Emma Seligman’s recent Shiva Baby, this is a low-key gem.

The Edinburgh International Film Festival runs until 21 August. For more information and tickets see edfilmfest.org; Alien: Romulus is also on general release from 16 August