Film reviews: The Ballad of Wallis Island | The Salt Path | Bogancloch

The Salt Path (12A) ★★☆☆☆

Bogancloch (U) ★★☆☆☆

A film about a lonely lottery winner who lures his favourite musician to his isolated home for a private gig, The Ballad of Wallis Island has a premise full of creepy possibilities. Sadly, this vehicle for British comedians Tim Key and Tom Basden (who co-wrote it together) exploits none of them, trotting out instead the increasingly tired hits of the British cringe-comedy playbook that have been in constant rotation since the heyday of The Office 20 years ago.

That’s not entirely surprising. The film has been expanded from a BAFTA-nominated short film Key, Basden and director James Griffiths made back in 2007 and a lot of the jokes have been transposed verbatim, with Key ― a cult mainstay of the British comedy scene who broke through on Alan Partridge ― especially grating as the film’s overbearing and over-sharing super-fan, Charles Heath, whose scheme to reunite his favourite folk duo, McGwyer and Mortimer, masks a cliché-ridden backstory straight out of a screenwriting book.

But it’s not just Key’s sweetened-up David Brent energy that’s the problem; Basden’s songs might be passable enough for the movie’s vaguely defined take on Britain’s alternative music scene, but as a folk-rock star undergoing something of a mid-life crisis after losing his way as a solo artist, he doesn’t really have the requisite leading man charisma to transcend his character Herb McGwyer’s own self-pitying, low-level narcissism.

Like the broken tap in Charles’ home, he’s a constant drip ― a fact reinforced by the casting of Carey Mulligan as Nell Mortimer, the former bandmate and romantic partner he ditched to go it alone. Her arrival on the island with her new American husband (Akemnji Ndifornyen ― conveniently dispatched on a bird-watching expedition almost the moment he gets there) stirs up all kinds of awkward and unresolved history, but Mulligan’s own star-wattage and vocal talents (last put to good use in the Coen brothers’ folk-themed Inside Llewyn Davis) just make it harder to buy into a conceit that imagines Herb having an ongoing solo career and her toiling away in obscurity making chutney for a living.

A cloying last-act lurch into sentimentality wraps everything up neatly, ending proceedings on a predictably contrived note that feels as false as the exaggerated sops to mainstream success Herb is repeatedly mocked throughout the film for embracing.

Crippled by debt, terminal illness and the intensifying ravages of middle age, the characters of The Salt Path ― a bland adaptation of the best-selling memoir of the same name ― follow a predictable road to salvation as they walk and wild camp along the Cornish coastline after losing their house and all their money in a dodgy investment.

Respectively played by Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson, the newly unhoused Moth and Raynor Winn stoically power through their misfortunes, achieving a kind of serenity of the dispossessed as they encounter random strangers, furtively try to hide their newfound poverty, and get repeatedly mistaken for poet laureate Simon Armitage and his wife.

But as the film clunkily drip-feeds backstory revealing flashbacks into their journey, what could have been a nuanced, Nomadland-esque take on the economic insecurity of life in Britain for all ages and class demographics recalls, instead, the similarly wan 2023 Brit walking film The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, with National Theatre director Marianne Elliott struggling to coax naturalistic performances out of anyone on screen.

With Bogancloch, artist filmmaker Ben Rivers returns to the Highlands locale of his 2011 film Two Years at Sea to catch up with its subject, Jake Williams, a hermit living somewhat off-the-grid amid the ramshackle squalor of his titular farm. Shot once more on appealingly scratchy 16mm celluloid that’s been manipulated and processed to create a kind of dreamy, elliptical ambiance, it is, like the earlier film, another abstract, black-and-white portrait of a man at ease with his largely solitary existence. Alas, also like the first film, it’s debatable whether it amounts to anything more than artful navel-gazing.

Long scenes of Williams snoozing in his caravan, snoozing in the woods, preparing roadkill for his cat, or bathing in a makeshift hot-tub don’t really build to anything particularly revealing or profound ― and though Rivers’ decision to intercut these sequences with decaying colour photographs gives us an intriguing, all-too-brief glimpse into the life Williams left behind as a former sailor, the film struggles to convey why we’re supposed to find him as fascinating as Rivers clearly does.

A contrived sequence midway through shows Williams in a classroom using a ratty beer garden parasol with cut-outs of the moon and sun dangling off it to explain ― badly ― the celestial sphere to some bewildered students, all of whom bolt for the door the moment the bell goes. By the time the end credits roll, it’s hard not to sympathise with them.

All films in cinemas from 30 May