Saoirse Ronan makes a character’s thinking clear in the way she speaks and carries herself. We rate her for that precision, though the films built around her do not always trust us to notice it.
Fi1m perspective
In Atonement (2007), Saoirse Ronan’s thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sounds certain that she understands the adults around her. Ronan gives that certainty enough force to make the prospect of correcting her seem remote, refusing the easy excuse that she is only a child. We were frightened by the calm with which she made a mistaken reading of adult behaviour sound settled. Joe Wright’s film gives her something uncomfortable to do, and she does it without asking us to find Briony endearing.
Brooklyn (2015) marked the move into adult leading roles after early parts that sometimes confined her to being quirky or precocious. Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017) made fuller use of her comic timing and spontaneity, with Little Women (2019) continuing their collaboration. We would welcome more of that looseness. Her technical control is useful, but it should not become a reason to cast her only as the serious young woman in period clothes.
In Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun (2024), the change is visible in Rona’s body: loose and loud when drinking, shoulders raised and hands pocketed when sober, walking as though the ground might shift. Ronan carries a film built almost entirely around her, and also takes a producing credit alongside Jack Lowden and Dominic Norris. The performance holds our attention because she makes the effort of staying well visible without turning every movement into a demonstration. The voiceover then explains what we can already see, and the last half hour repeats itself. She is better than the film, which is good enough to make that a recommendation.
Blitz (2024) is the more frustrating case, though Steve McQueen finds a welcome plainness in her Rita, a mother who sings well and would rather be at home. Her factory-floor scenes with Mica Ricketts have a warmth the film could use more often. Peter Sciberras’s editing keeps switching between mother and son, leaving Rita’s search to restart in corridors where she asks questions. Ronan cannot supply momentum that those scenes have not been given. Start with Atonement; try The Outrun for what she can sustain when almost nobody else is there to help.
Biography
Saoirse Una Ronan is an Irish actress born on 12 April 1994 in the Bronx, New York City. She holds Irish and US citizenship and identifies as Irish. She made her acting debut in 2003 in the Irish series The Clinic and had her breakthrough as the young Briony Tallis in Atonement (2007).
Ronan is known for roles including Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones (2009), Hanna in Hanna (2011), Eilis Lacey in Brooklyn (2015), the title character in Lady Bird (2017), Jo March in Little Women (2019), and a supporting part in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). She has received four Academy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award.
She portrayed Abigail Williams in the 2016 Broadway revival of The Crucible and Lady Macbeth in the 2021 West End revival of Macbeth. In 2024 she starred as Rita in Blitz and as Rona, whom she also produced, in The Outrun.
