Cast: Gillian Anderson, Jason Isaacs, James Lance, Hermione Norris
Genre: Drama
Director:Â Marianne Elliott
In Irish Cinemas: 30th May 2025
One night, under the frail cover of a tent pitched perilously close to the sea, a couple is wrenched from sleep. The wind howls like a living thing, tearing at the fabric above them. Waves rise in fury, clawing at the canvas, dragging away their scattered belongings—lightweight, hastily packed, and now claimed by the ocean. In the chaos, they cry out, stumble in the darkness, curse the tide and everything it threatens to wash away. But this isn’t just a storm. It’s the beginning. The start of something raw and defiant. This is where The Salt Path begins—not with triumph, but with resistance. With the refusal to be broken. With the will to endure.
In August 2013, Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, both in their fifties, set out from Minehead, a coastal town in Somerset. Their goal was audacious: to walk the entire 630-mile South West Coast Path, tracing the rugged edge of England through Devon, Cornwall, and beyond. They had little more than a battered tent bought on eBay, two discount sleeping bags, a small stash of cash, and a bank card tied to meagre government benefits—£48 a week. Days earlier, their world had imploded. After losing a bitter legal battle, they were evicted from their beloved farm, their livelihood gone. As if fate wasn’t finished, a devastating diagnosis followed: Moth had a terminal neurodegenerative disease.
Faced with ruin, they chose motion over despair. They walked. With every footstep, they resisted invisibility, poverty, and grief. Walking became their means of survival, not just physically, but spiritually, as they reasserted their presence in a world that had quietly discarded them. The Salt Path is not just a journey along the coast; it is a journey back to the self, to love, and to the simplest kind of human resilience.
Now brought to the screen by writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, The Salt Path is adapted from Raynor Winn’s acclaimed memoir, a bestseller and a beacon for readers seeking solace in nature and hope. The film stars Jason Isaacs (The White Lotus, Harry Potter) and Gillian Anderson (Sex Education, The Crown) as the quietly heroic couple. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival before arriving in London, drawing praise for its intimate, stripped-back storytelling. With minimal dialogue and few supporting characters, the film leans entirely on the magnetic connection between its leads—it is their story, and theirs alone.
From the outset, the journey is punishing. Moth, weakened by illness, staggers under the weight of his pack. Raynor, physically exhausted and mentally frayed, carries more than gear—she holds her grief, her fear, her memories of children now grown and scattered, one in Croatia, another at university. They eat whatever they can cook over a flickering camp stove: mostly rice, pasta, the occasional foraged mushroom. They drink from cold springs. They sleep in the wild. They ache. And yet, they keep moving. Step after step.
Isaacs and Anderson deliver deeply felt, nuanced performances. There’s a weathered familiarity to their on-screen relationship—a lived-in affection expressed not in grand declarations, but in glances, gestures, the quiet intimacy of long-held love. They quarrel, they comfort, they joke, they worry. In their silences, we hear a lifetime of shared history. As they walk, they rediscover not only each other, but a fragile belief that life might still offer something beautiful.
Along the way, the film becomes a meditation on homelessness—not just as a lack of shelter, but as a loss of place, of identity, of belonging. Raynor and Moth encounter all shades of human response. Some people look away, suspicious or indifferent. Others extend kindness—offering food, a place to sleep, a moment of companionship. The film quietly asks what it truly means to be without a home, and whether a home can exist beyond walls and roofs. In time, Raynor begins to sense that home might be something altogether more elemental: a shared journey, a warm hand, the rhythm of walking side by side.
Beneath the hardship and the heartache is also a love letter—to the wild, to the natural world, to the often-overlooked beauty of the English coast. Sweeping vistas and the gentle sounds of birdsong fill the screen. We see rabbits darting through undergrowth, seals watching from rocky outcrops, and goats navigating cliff edges. The landscape is a character in its own right: magnificent and indifferent, serene and savage. It shelters and challenges them, offering a kind of healing that no medication ever could. By the end, now settled in a modest cottage, Raynor finds herself longing for the open air once more—for the freedom of the path, the vastness of the sky.
The film unfolds with deliberate slowness. There are no dramatic crescendos, no neat resolutions. Subplots flicker in and out with the strangers they meet—some gentle, some unsettling—but nothing lingers long. The story accumulates rather than escalates. Like the coastline itself, it winds forward with quiet persistence. You may find yourself waiting for a revelatory moment, some seismic shift, but it never quite comes. That absence feels deliberate and honest. The truth is: this isn’t a story of destination. It is a story of endurance, of presence, of staying upright when everything else falls.
The Salt Path is not an epic. It is not loud, or fast, or dazzling. What it is is deeply human. It is a film about loss and love, survival and solidarity. About what we cling to when there’s nothing left. And it answers with quiet conviction: we hold on to each other, to the earth beneath our feet, and to the fragile, stubborn hope that even in ruin, life still has something to offer.
Overall: 7.5/10
Movie Reviewer
