Hot on the heels of last year’s The Outrun (or, rather, trudging along behind it with blistered feet) comes The Salt Path, another adaptation of a memoir (by Raynor Winn, published in 2018) about the healing power of nature, featuring craggy coastlines and encounters with seals. Two examples don’t make a trend, but could it be that studios have identified ‘bestselling nature-writing-slash-memoir’ as a new kind of exportable British intellectual property? While on paper this true story of a middle-aged couple facing homelessness and a debilitating disease embarking on a trek along the southwest coast of England should be compelling, in actuality the road is a bit tough going.
We begin in medias res with hippyish Ray (Gillian Anderson) and Moth (Jason Isaacs) fighting the elements to rescue their tent from being washed away by the tide. We’re then taken back to the beginning of their journey, and both seem weary before they’ve even started. Interwoven flashbacks reveal that not only have they lost their home due to a dodgy investment, Moth has been diagnosed with a rare terminal illness that severely impacts his movement. They walk because they have nowhere else to go and just £40 a week to live on.
Playing a couple with years of marriage under their belt, Anderson and Isaacs have decent chemistry — even if the pair are rather too glamorous with their perfectly windswept hair to be believably penniless and roughing it.
As they make their difficult journey along the clifftops, Moth often limping in pain, they inevitably encounter varying degrees of human decency, from free pasties to being prodded by a posho with a walking stick. Screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Disobedience, She Said) is able to avoid some if not all of the clichés of the long-walk-to-self-discovery subgenre and includes some light commentary à la Bait on Cornwall’s split identity as both a holiday destination for the rich and one of the poorest regions of the UK. But the story here is too unfocused to land a point.
Both central performances are solid. Playing a couple with years of marriage under their belt, Anderson and Isaacs have decent chemistry — even if the pair are rather too glamorous with their perfectly windswept hair to be believably penniless and roughing it. But the real problem is the pacing; the film feels baggy and repetitive and fizzles out instead of reaching a dramatic conclusion. It’s all nice enough, while also feeling indistinct and unmemorable. It would be hard to make the Cornish coastline look ugly and there is solid work here from cinematographer Hélène Louvart (La Chimera, The Lost Daughter). But when the journey is this meandering and anticlimactic, the prettiness of the scenery isn’t quite enough to keep you going.