Director: Marianne Elliott

Stars: Gillian Anderson, Jason Isaacs, James Lance

This episodic big screen adaptation of Raynor Winn’s memoir 'The Salt Path' is in turns lyrical and harrowing. After losing their house after a bad investment and subsequent legal problems, Raynor (Anderson) and her husband Moth (Winn), decide to hit the road on a walking trip, seemingly through an absence of anything else to do. Their planned journey is a 630-mile hike along the Southwest Coastal Path, from Minehead to Poole, which will take them around the coast of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset. As the fiftysomethings make their way, it becomes apparent that, not only are Moth and Raynor completely unprepared, with no suitable equipment and not enough funds for such a trip, but that Moth is seriously ill with Corticobasal, a rare degenerative disease which can cause problems with movement, speech, memory and swallowing. En route they meet with angry landowners who object to their illegal camping, but encounter kindness too, from a young bakery employee, and a New Age commune, where they are sheltered temporarily. In sequences so odd they carry the ring of truth, Moth is mistaken for writer Simon Armitage, and the couple are invited to the plush holiday home of louche Londoner Grant (Lance) and his ill-defined ‘family’, probably because of the Armitage thing. The distressing moments of privation are leavened with moments of grace with cinematographer Hélène Louvart deploying overcast greyness for the more troubling scenes and life-affirming sunlit colour for the more uplifting moments. The picture sometimes skirts sentimentality while wilfully avoiding some of the knottier aspects of their history, presenting their ill-advised and very dangerous trip as some journey of self-discovery. Still, the leads are excellent: Isaacs’ Black Country chummy optimism (‘Gee whizz!’) belying a vulnerability, and Anderson bringing a gritty forbearance to Raynor; and the couple’s relationship, best conveyed in moments of quiet, and in small gestures, feels convincingly lived-in and organic.

David Willoughby

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