The Salt Path, which came out on 30th May is the feature length debut film of director Marianne Elliot. It is based on the memoir of the same name written by Raynor Winn about her and her husband, Moth walking the South West Coastal Path after becoming homeless and her husband having been diagnosed with a rare terminal illness.

This is a film where it would be very easy to resort to slightly worn-out cliches. Heart-warming, touching, moving etc. But it is real and it is true and so you can’t be cynical about it, even if I did slightly cringe at the last line, something along the lines of “you have the look, you have been salted”. But that was the only bit. And potentially if this were a made-up story, I might have issue with the happy ending, but again this was about life and I was very happy for it.

This is a film where the geography and seasons of this part of the British coast are the third character, having as strong a presence as Raynor (Gillian Andersen) and Moth (Jason Isaacs). It is one of those films that needs to be seen in a cinema where you really feel the tide suddenly subsuming the tent and join Raynor and Moth in scrambling for sleeping bags among incoming waves. The audience experiences a visceral engagement with the landscape and have to surrender to it like those situations where rain batters down and you have no choice but to get soaked. It is an active sensory experience, the drama of the crashing storm scenes reminded me of The Outrun (2024), also based on a nature memoir, written by Amy Liptrot, directed by Nora Fingscheidt.

This is also a very human film which connects the audience to the individuality and humanity of each person, attesting to the beauty of the acting. We see Gillian Anderson’s very distinctive nostalgic half-smile where she tucks a bit of her lip in and has a distant look in her eyes. We see Jason Isaac’s deep understanding of what it means to walk with a limp, particularly with a progressive condition and how this changes depending on the day, the weather and exhaustion levels. There are very love-filled humorous micro-interactions between them, particularly enjoyable are the eyebrow raises at the interesting characters they come across.

There is a beautiful simplicity to this film but it doesn’t allow you to just let it wash over you. It actively pulls you down and in, like a rip current, it makes you stare at the suffering of the characters in the eyes, you can’t look away. But it is also generous in the way that it carries the audience along with it and in both the pain and the beauty, it feels that you have lived some of Raynor and Moth’s journey with them.