‘The Salt Path’ Is a Lesson in What We Want to Believe

A film intended to inspire audiences with a story of homelessness, illness and endurance now arrives in US theaters under a cloud of doubt. “The Salt Path,” based on Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir, stars Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs as a British couple who suddenly lose their home and face a dire medical diagnosis. They respond by taking a life-changing hike along Cornwall’s dramatic coast.

When the film opened in the United Kingdom last year, critics praised its message of resilience. The memoir had been presented as an inspirational true story, and the adaptation carried that promise onto the screen.

Then a journalist produced evidence that almost all of the book’s key details were false. Winn defended her account, but the allegations placed the memoir alongside other controversies involving fabricated autobiographies.

The investigation by journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou has assembled what the article calls a highly persuasive body of evidence. That has given the film an unusual afterlife. It reaches American audiences as a supposedly true story meant to offer hope, while also reminding them how readily people can believe a compelling narrative, and how vulnerable even widely celebrated stories are to being exposed as unreliable.