As a couple in trouble, Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs find a path

Sydney Morning Herald

14-05-2025

THE SALT PATH
★★★★
M. 115 minutes. In cinemas May 15
I spent much of The Salt Path in a nervous sweat. From the very beginning, it seems like a story that's going to end in a screen awash with tears.
It's about a slow-going marathon – a 1000-kilometre walk along Britain's West Coast undertaken by Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs as a couple who have hit hard times.
They start off from a cliff in Somerset, with Anderson's Ray Winn looking worried as her husband, Moth, struggles up their first hill, dragging his left foot. Yet they press on, sleeping in their small tent, boiling noodles for dinner and weathering the contempt of dog-walkers who don't like campers intruding on their patch.
And while they trudge through the bracken, we take an excursion into their past via a series of flashbacks explaining the reason they have been forced to go on the road. An unwise financial investment has plunged them into a debt so large they have lost their farm and everything else they own. And even more disastrous is the cause of Moth's foot trouble. I'll spare you the medical details but the prognosis leaves little room for hope.
In the face of misfortune on this scale, it's tempting to tune out and leave them to it, but Anderson and Isaacs are both so appealing in the roles that you can't help becoming involved. Now and again they make a move so rash that it has you muttering in frustration, but they also have a taste for gallows humour which bubbles up when the going is particularly tough. I too shared their rising sense of suspense on every visit to an ATM and I admired their resilience when the noodles ran out.
And there are light moments. At one point, a jaunty figure with a Panama hat and an ice-cream (James Lance) invites them to his luxurious house to meet his glamorous wife and her equally glamorous friends, and all is going well until an unexpected revelation kicks in and the lunch offer evaporates.
It's not an entirely wasted experience. Up to this point, Moth has left Ray to handle the guidebook and any money they have left. Hunger, however, proves a great inspiration, and while Ray is gazing soulfully into the window of a fish-and-chip shop, he suddenly leaps up and announces to the passing crowd that he's about to perform. People stop, looking bemused, as he launches into a reading from Beowulf, the book he has been carrying in his rucksack. And such is the energy of his delivery that he's a great success. His hat is passed round and they have money for lunch.