‘The Salt Path’ is structurally very similar to the recent British road movies ‘The Last Bus’ and ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ in terms of giving us quasi-eccentric types who undertake tortuous geographical excursions from one part of the country to another in order to ‘find themselves’ and/or make peace with the past.

It’s an affecting drama, based on a true story, of a late middle aged couple who find themselves homeless, and where the husband, played by Jason Isaacs, is diagnosed with a terminal illness called Corticobasal syndrome which will impair his mobility, yet is not deemed by the Department for Work and Pensions to have a sufficiently chronic or life-threatening disability, resulting in their long term nomadic lifestyle, living in a tent as they walk each day from Somerset to Cornwall, carrying all their worldly goods – and all their cares and worries – on their shoulders.

The walk is a means of surviving the fact that they have nowhere else to go, but along the way they receive unexpected forms of help, and they offer in turn help to other wounded souls along the salt path, and this becomes a form of redemption for the couple, with a lovely, unexpected coda at the end delivered ahead of the credits. Gillian Anderson puts in a differently textured performance to the one for which she is best remembered in the cult 90s sci-fi series ‘The X-Files’, and here a scene where she enters her debit card into a bank cash machine and discovers she has less than £2 to her name, and which she then enters the bank to have that money cashed, is a moment of drama and pathos which confirms the adage that small is beautiful.

The healing power of nature and the ‘salt of the earth’ people who trudge along its shoreline is what makes ‘The Salt Path’ a powerful drama, though for a film about two lost souls walking it is rather more pedestrian at times than it might have been, with many of the scenes feeling like repetitions of what we have already seen as they keep realizing that they don’t have enough money to sustain themselves. Isaacs struggles to keep moving due to his debilitating condition – only then for him to show remarkable signs of fortitude and stamina to counterbalance the slog.