Cast: Gillian Anderson, Jason Isaacs
Director: Marianne Elliott
Platform: In cinemas from May 30
Rating out 5: ★★★
Marianne Elliott’s The Salt Path, adapted from Raynor Winn’s best-selling memoir, arrives as a meditation on endurance, both the physical kind, as feet blister over hundreds of miles of English coastline, and the emotional kind, as a couple faces the slow collapse of everything they thought defined their life.
This is a film that wears its emotional heart openly, almost challengingly, on its sleeve. It’s gorgeously shot, quietly acted, and unafraid to be about something as small (and as large) as two people trying not to break. And yet, for all its ambition and beauty, The Salt Path doesn’t always find its footing.
Let’s start with what works.
We meet Raynor and Moth Winn, played by Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, as their world caves in. A failed investment, a botched business deal but the details are almost secondary. What matters is the outcome, their farmhouse is seized, their bank account emptied, and, as if to add cruelty to catastrophe, Moth receives a devastating diagnosis of a terminal degenerative illness. With nowhere to go, they set out on an unlikely odyssey: walking the 630-mile South West Coast Path, one of Britain’s most rugged and breathtaking trails, with a battered tent and very little else.
Anderson and Isaacs are, I have to say, quietly magnificent together. This is not the kind of onscreen chemistry that blazes and sparks; rather, it simmers. It’s the intimacy of a long partnership, weathered by disappointment but stitched together by habit, humour, and deep- seated care. Anderson’s Raynor is sharp-edged, her brittle exterior hiding the grief she refuses to give voice to; Isaacs’s Moth is softer, more open, a man grappling not just with illness but with the sudden, shaming loss of the life he thought he’d built.
What’s most moving is how little they need to say to each other. A glance, a shared laugh, a snapped rebuke over a too-heavy backpack. Anderson and Isaacs make us feel the full weight of decades together in these small moments. You believe these are two people who have loved each other too long to need dramatic declarations.
Visually, the film is often stunning. Cinematographer Hélène Louvart (whose credits include The Lost Daughter and Happy as Lazzaro) gives us a coastline that is both beautiful and brutal. There’s no soft-focus, postcard romanticism here. The cliffs loom, the sea thrashes, the wind cuts. The land itself becomes a third character in the relationship, indifferent, punishing, and yet, in moments, strangely healing.
Elliott wisely lets the landscape do a lot of the talking, often pulling back to wide, painterly shots that allow us to sit with the couple’s smallness against the vastness of nature. It’s here that The Salt Path is at its best, when it trusts the audience to absorb the emotional stakes without forcing them.
And yet, for all this beauty, the film has a tendency to undercut itself.
The narrative sometimes drags, weighed down by repetitive beats: another night of damp misery, another stranger’s suspicious glance, another stretch of painful walkiing. We are meant to feel the exhaustion and monotony alongside the characters, but cinematically, it risks numbing us. The pacing, especially in the middle section, feels sluggish, looping through the same hardships without enouugh variation or escalation.
More frustrating is the script’s occasional overreliance on exposition. There are moments where characters explain things we’ve already seen or felt, spelling out emotions that would have been more powerful left unsaid. A particular late-act argument between Raynor and Moth, where old resentments bubble up, feels like it’s ticking off thematic boxes rather than emerging organically from the characters. You sense the script reaching for catharsis, but the dialogue is too on-the-nose, robbing the scene of its potential rawness.
There’s also, perhaps inevitably, a creeping sentimentality. The real-life story is extraordinary, a testament to resilience, love, and finding renewal in the simplest acts of survival. But the film occasionally leans too hard into its message, veering into territory that feels crafted for emotional effect rather than earned from character. Some of the supporting characters they encounter, a kindly farmer, a sneering rich walker, feel sketched more as narrative devices than as people. They exist to highlight themes, to offer contrast or insight, but they rarely leave a lasting impression.
That said, there are moments where The Salt Path finds something quietly transcendent. A scene where Moth, despite his illness, dances playfully in the surf; Raynor’s wary smile softening as she watches. A night under the stars, where the couple shares old memories, the weight of what they’ve lost mixing with a tentative sense of possibility. These are the moments where the film breaks free of its more formulaic impulses, where Anderson and Isaacs remind us why they are such compelling actors, capable of conveying entire histories in a look or a laugh.
Thematically, the film touches on big, often uncomfortable questions: what do we owe each other when everything is falling apart? What does survival look like, not just physically, but emotionally? How do we rebuild a sense of self when the pillars we’ve built our life on home, security, health are stripped away?
It doesn’t answer all these questions, and perhaps wisely so. Instead, The Salt Path offers a kind of elegiac meditation on endurance: the idea that sometimes, all you can do is keep moving forward, even if you don’t know where the path leads.
In the end, The Salt Path isn’t a perfect film. It’s uneven, occasionally clunky, and prone to overexplaining itself. But it’s also a deeply human story, told with grace and anchored by two magnetic performances. Anderson and Isaacs make you believe in Raynor and Moth’s journey, not just the physical trek along the coastline, but the harder, messier journey of staying connected to each other when everything else has been lost.
It’s a film that invites you to walk alongside its characters, to feel their weariness, their small joys, their quiet triumphs. And while it may not sweep you off your feet, it leaves you with a lingering sense of respect for the couple, for the landscape, and for the sheer, stubborn act of putting one foot in front of the other.
