What do you do when you lose everything? This is the question Ray (Gillian Anderson) and her husband Moth (Jason Isaacs) face when their home and all their worldly possessions are seized following an investment scheme gone wrong. Not that they had much to begin with: a modest farmhouse, a portion of which they rented out as holiday accommodation, an old Landcruiser, and the usual worthless odds and ends that accumulate over the course of a life. Their motivation for investing in the first place is obscure; in a brief, heated exchange Ray accuses Moth of greed, he accuses her of bungling their defence in court. To complicate matters further, Moth is diagnosed with a rare condition which impedes movement and has a bleak prognosis. Thus begins their journey along the famous South West Coast Path, which winds for over a thousand kilometres from Minehead in Somerset along the coasts of Devon and Cornwall to Poole Harbour in Dorset.

Based on Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir, The Salt Path follows Ray and Moth as they leave their old life behind for a future as uncertain as the English summer weather. It is British theatre director Marianne Elliott’s debut film and comes from a screenplay by Rebecca Lenkiewicz who clearly has a taste for women’s stories told by women (she co-wrote the excellent She Said [2022]). The Salt Path is written, directed, and shot by women, and it shows in the film’s overall approach, depth, and sensibility. It is sensitively shot by renowned cinematographer Hélène Louvart, who has worked with Agnès Varda and Alice Rohrwacher, for whom landscape is as important as character. Louvart captures the changing climate and mood beautifully: dramatically lit vistas are juxtaposed with dark, tightly framed shots inside the tent; sun-drenched fields of gold, green gorse, and purple-pink heather are offset by brown-grey rain and windswept seascapes. Adapting Winn’s book meant transforming description and lengthy internal monologues into visuals, which the film achieves admirably. Winn’s thoughts and reflections – the kind of dramatic internal processing a life crisis engenders – are difficult to show onscreen without voiceover narration. The film eschews this, relying instead on the performances of Anderson and Isaacs as much as the stunning coastal landscape of south-west England.

Gillian Anderson as Ray (courtesy of Transmission Films)

Anderson’s far-off gaze captures Ray’s strength and sensitivity in a quiet yet powerful way; her etched face is a landscape as elemental as the one it reflects, which as a seasoned walker has left its mark on her. Isaacs’s performance garners sympathy despite the largely self-inflicted nature of his situation. In the third season of The White Lotus Issacs plays a wealthy financier facing bankruptcy and prison. The Salt Path reprises this role, swapping a Ralph Lauren linen edit for a low-tech, gorpcore aesthetic destined for internet style guides. For inspiration, Moth carries a battered copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of the Old English epic Beowulf, drawing parallels between his own plight and that of the Nordic hero who travelled great distances to prove his strength. The film is not about Moth’s heroism, however, nor is the path some kind of proving ground for a wounded masculinity. Rather, it is about a relationship between two people in which gendered roles are dissolved into an ethos of care, for each other, for those they encounter on the way, and for the earth on which they tread. The Salt Path is an epic journey without any specific goal, other than the vague idea of making it to Lands End, a proclamation even Ray and Moth do not fully believe. What will happen after is something they do not even want to think about, and thus the journey quickly becomes about the here and now, about the very immediate problems of how to eat and where to sleep. It unfolds like a Zen parable where enlightenment occurs by performing the everyday tasks required for a radically simplified existence.

At times Ray and Moth struggle with their status as ‘homeless’ – asking for hot water at cafes before sneaking a teabag from their packs, withdrawing one pound from the bank – before finally acknowledging it. When asked by a family of hikers if they are retired, Moth surprisingly replies, ‘No, homeless actually,’ abruptly ending the exchange. There is more than one dark night of soul-searching and despair, even panic, but the sun also rises and each day is generally greeted with optimism and bonhomie. At times hunger becomes a hard reality. There is a scene in which Ray eats vicariously, chewing air while watching a woman eat ice cream. The couple do, however, share some light moments, such as when Moth is misrecognised as famous poet and walker Simon Armitage, resulting in the offer of beers and a free meal from a group of adoring fans.

The Salt Path belongs to a modest cluster of films about those who literally ‘walk away’, which includes Agnès Varda’s The Vagabond (1985), Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas (1984), Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), and Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild (2014). They tap into a fantasy of losing or giving up everything, the flipside to endless accumulation and striving. Neo-liberal capitalism, with its emphasis on overabundance and aspiration, creates a situation wherein we are systematically deprived of the most fundamental connection to survival. Occasionally, these pleasures are packaged and sold to us as part of the ‘experience economy’. The Salt Path may offer a slightly fetishized vision of destitution, but it also shows how much abundance and convenience have eroded our lives, and how deprivation, at least in the short term, can teach us more about living than any number of useless commodities. Ray and Moth do not escape neo-liberal ideology for long; no one can completely, short of dying. They must inevitably negotiate their return, but there remain those moments when it is still possible to be wholly present: a bowl of noodles on a cold dark heath, a hot shower in a tent park, a salted blackberry offered as a gift from an obliging stranger, a piping hot cup of tea after a day’s trekking, or blistered feet bathed in the ocean. It is possible to walk away from it all, even for a short time.

The Salt Path (Transmission Films) is released nationally on 15 May 2025.