After losing their home and livelihood, a middle-aged couple impulsively set out on a 630-mile walk along the southwest English coast, a walk complicated to no small degree by the recent diagnosis of a terminal neurodegenerative disease.
Ray (Gillian Anderson) and Moth (Jason Isaacs) are out of time, money, and hope. They’ve been forced out of the B&B that was going to provide for their retirement, with nowhere to go, and Moth has recently been diagnosed with a terminal neurodegenerative disease. And that is how, in a moment of panic, they decide to walk the Salt Path, a 630-mile trek along the English coast from Dorset to Somerset. Are they trying to outrun an existential crisis or embarking on one last adventure? Does it even matter?
Adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, Disobedience, She Said) from the 2018 memoir by Raynor Winn, The Salt Path marks the moviemaking debut of four-time Tony Award–winning theatre director Marianne Elliott. But this is no chamber drama. Elliott and her crew filmed in some breathtakingly beautiful locations — though not always in the finest of weather. This is a bracingly cinematic tale of a couple struggling against the elements and trying not to turn on one another, while the whole world seems bent on beating them down.
Anderson and Isaacs put everything they have into their performances, conveying physical exhaustion on their faces as much as their bodies. The two stars carry one another like the rucksacks on their backs, trudging ever forward as the characters learn the cycles of coastal weather and slowly shed their expectations of luxury or even comfort. The Salt Path is a story of who we become when everything else is stripped away — and who we find walking alongside us, if we’re very lucky.
JANE SCHOETTLE
Content advisory: mature themes, sexually suggestive scenes, coarse language
Screenings
Scotiabank 1
Royal Alexandra Theatre
Scotiabank 1
Scotiabank 11