Based upon the 2018 memoir of the same name from Raynor Winn, which is quickly emerging as a book club favourite across the globe, The Salt Path’s tale of overcoming adversity seems ripe for mining on the big screen. It follows a married couple, Raynor and Moth Winn, who find themselves homeless after a long legal battle and are contending with the latter's fatal neurodegenerative disease. Directed by Marianna Elliott, The Salt Path stars two favourites of contemporary British cinema, Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
Silver cinema at its most cloying and arduous, The Salt Path takes the long, winding road of emotional manipulation and narrow-minded tropes in Marianna Elliott's exhausting directorial effort. Complete with confounding detours and numerous diversions, The Salt Path is doomed from the start by a frustrating lack of focus and drive, resulting in a film that appears to amble aimlessly for prolonged periods without clear direction.
Elliott's first time in the director's seat is hindered by a sprawling story she lacks experience or expertise to contain or streamline, causing the story to stray too far off the beaten path and toward disappointing repetition of predictable narrative beats and filmmaking conventions making it, for the most part, unsalvageable. Only adding to the feeling of manipulation is Chris Roe's score, a heavy-handed affair that too obviously prescribes emotional beats and seems untrusting of both its audience and the story at hand to allow feel anything themselves. Whenever the film finds a moment to deliver something genuine or earnest, it instead chooses the path of least resistance, leaning into schmaltz to exploit the viewer in a manner that is hard to shake and even harder to forgive.
To The Salt Path's credit, Helene Louvart is a real MVP, whose cinematography is impressive, conjuring a surprising beauty to appreciate. The natural environment becomes a character in its own right through Louvart’s dynamic approach, capturing both its scenic peace and the brutality that pushes Raynor and Moth to the brink, and it features pockets of powerful work that tease the potential of a story like this coming to the big screen. But those moments are too few and far between, and instead frustrate in their fleetingness.
A bizarre, non-linear effort, Rebecca Lenkiewicz's screenplay has the admittedly unenviable task of adapting the tricky memoir. Stifled by an absence of contextual detail that would have enriched our understanding and connection to the central pair, but instead fails to provide the foundation for their love and connection, The Salt Path can only be carried so far with such a lack of emotional resonance. With very little detail of their situation - particularly the strained relationship they have with their children and the considerable leap to the decisions they make to venture out beyond their comfort zone - the film's lack of clarity is truly bewildering. It inadvertently shoulders questions of privilege it has no intention of answering, and all its warnings of “this could happen to anyone” feel toothless by failing to reckon with wider societal themes beyond the broadest brushstrokes of 'judgement' and 'no support'.
In truth, both names above the title feel miscast. It’s not that either Jason Isaacs or Gillian Anderson delivers a particularly bad performance, but rather that their more affluent personalities feel unsuited to a story of such economic hardship, and the film can play a little out of tune as a result. Both actors are undoubtedly committed and their chemistry is believable, but constrained by a screenplay that fails to give them the emotional or thematic depth, they cannot lose themselves in the characters because they are not rendered with the dynamic needed to make their plight meaningful or believable. Instead, both Isaacs and Anderson become a distraction to the story at hand, papering over the cracks of a weak screenplay.
The Salt Path is made for a very specific audience, and those who have experienced - and, crucially, enjoyed - the source material will appreciate the screen translation; but for those seeking more potency from the feature will be sorely disappointed with the rote, unstimulated direction it takes - one that feels both lightweight and laborious. Even before reports of the source material's validity came into question, there is an overwhelming disingenuous feel to The Salt Path, with its lack of depth immediately rejecting any potency that could have arisen for a story of hope, loss and struggle in economic hardship, causing the whole thing to feel like the path no one should be taking.