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‘Salt in My Soul’ Review: Living, Even Thriving, With Illness

This documentary reconstructs the life of Mallory Smith, who died at 25 after a lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis.

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By Ben Kenigsberg

Making a documentary that doubles as a final testament is no easy task. But with access to family members, doctors, personal reflections and hospital footage (which includes a surgery), “Salt in My Soul” poignantly reconstructs the life of Mallory Smith, who received a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis at 3 years old. She died in 2017 at 25, just as she had started to undergo an experimental treatment aimed at destroying the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that had made her course with the illness much more difficult.

Despite the challenges of living with the disease, she became an accomplished athlete, a Stanford graduate and an indomitable life force, judging from the testimonies of those close to her and from her own words. The director, Will Battersby, draws on audio and video that Smith recorded and a journal she kept privately over a decade. (She gave her mother the password to be used after her death.) Her writings were condensed into the 2019 book “Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life.”

The movie becomes many things: a memorial; an awareness-raising tool about cystic fibrosis and the possibilities of bacteriophage therapies; and a consideration of how it’s possible to live as Smith said she endeavored to — assuming she would die the next day while still, as she put it in a diary entry, “prolonging my life + planning for my future.”

Smith thought that knowing she didn’t have much time gave her a perspective most people lack. Her journal, a friend suggests, gave her an outlet for her frustrations that permitted her to stay outwardly optimistic.

“Salt in My Soul” is extremely painful to watch, especially as it shows the roller coaster of Smith’s recurring hospitalizations. But it does paint a vivid portrait of who she was and what she believed.

Salt in My Soul Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.

Review: The documentary ‘Salt in My Soul’ is a moving tribute to Mallory Smith

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Intimacy pervades the moving documentary “Salt in My Soul,” based on the posthumously published journals of Mallory Smith , a vibrant young woman with cystic fibrosis . Smith chronicled her experience with both raw honesty and real eloquence, and director Will Battersby refuses to cut away from more painful moments of the disease and its effects on Smith and her family. Otherwise, Battersby’s by-the-numbers style obfuscates the power of Smith’s inspiring life.

Interviews, family photos and home videos are interspersed with footage of Smith’s final years, creating a cinematic legacy. “Salt in My Soul” follows Smith as she fights CF alongside her devoted family while trying to live as close to normal as possible. Treatments and hospital stays punctuate her experience of playdates, vacations and dorm-room hangouts over the years, with Smith’s vivacity and tenacity encouraging her friends, family and doctors — and the audience, in turn.

“Salt in My Soul” is emotionally affecting, but its ordinary approach hamstrings the story of a woman who seemed truly extraordinary. It often seems tailored more as a tribute to Smith for those who knew her, offering scant captions that introduce talking-head interviewees with only their first name, leaving surnames and connection to Smith and her life ambiguous. Battersby’s film also doesn’t always explain medical terms used, making it less impactful for those without Smith’s experience and more resonant for those who have CF, an isolating experience because bacteria passed from one patient to another can be deadly. “Salt in My Soul” refers to the healing powers of ocean water for CF patients, but unfortunately Battersby only skims the surface here.

‘Salt in My Soul’

Not rated Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes Playing: Starts Jan. 21, Laemmle Royal, Los Angeles; available Jan. 25 on VOD

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Salt in My Soul

Based on Mallory Smith's posthumously published memoir, Salt In My Soul offers a look inside the mind of a young woman trying to live while dying. Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, Mallory tur... Read all Based on Mallory Smith's posthumously published memoir, Salt In My Soul offers a look inside the mind of a young woman trying to live while dying. Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, Mallory turned to a secret diary to record her thoughts. Based on Mallory Smith's posthumously published memoir, Salt In My Soul offers a look inside the mind of a young woman trying to live while dying. Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, Mallory turned to a secret diary to record her thoughts.

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• Sep 1, 2023
• January 21, 2022 (United States)
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Film Review: Salt in My Soul

ASSEMBLED FROM home movies, recordings, and diaries kept by the late Mallory Smith, Salt in My Soul charts the journey of one woman who spent her life dealing with the devastating effects of cystic fibrosis, a fatal disease that attacks the lungs from a young age.

Adapted from Smith’s posthumously published memoir, it’s quite a moving film—but it’s not a typical sob story. Diagnosed at the age of three, Smith was determined to live as full a life as she could in the short amount of time that she had. She was an athlete, a traveler, and a vivacious personality who—at least according to the footage that we see in the film—maintained her good humor even in the face of a terrifying prognosis and multiple daily treatments.

There are, naturally, a lot of insights into potential treatments and the many medical challenges posed by cystic fibrosis; it’s a disease whose name is quite common, but most people seem to be unaware of its effects, or even that it’s fatal. (Smith’s own brother admits in an interview that he assumed early on that it was a condition one just managed.) But what makes Salt in My Soul worthwhile is the intimacy and breadth of the footage presented here, which director Will Battersby mixes with interviews featuring Mallory’s family and friends. (And to his credit, he only goes to the treacly sad piano music well a couple of times.) Even so, it’ll certainly be a tough watch for some sensitive viewers; it’s not easy watching someone die, especially someone so vibrant and charming and young.

In some ways, that the movie doesn’t indulge in tragedy is what makes it so tragic. Because what ultimately comes through is the ordinariness of Smith’s life: Yes, she’s remarkable, but she’s also just another person, dealing with the most terrifying of circumstances. Watching the film, one senses her loss the way one might sense the loss of a friend.

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Salt in My Soul Movie Review: What It Means to Search for Hope and Answers

Most of us don’t consider our own mortality as children. But children who live with chronic diseases are forced to confront their mortality very early on. For Mallory Smith, this realization came when she was just nine years old. By this time, she had already been living with Cystic Fibrosis for six years after being diagnosed with the disease at the age of three. From that moment of realization, Smith began chronicling her thoughts and fears in her secret diary, one that would come to light only after she died at the age of 25. The new documentary  Salt in My Soul is pulled from the over 2,500 pages of Smith’s diary and based on the posthumously published book of the same name. Director Will Battersby takes Smith’s words and innermost thoughts and combines them with hours of footage from her incredible life, photos of her struggles and victories, and interviews with her as well as the friends and family who love and miss her in this powerful documentary. 

Salt in My Soul has a number of layers to it. It serves as an educational piece about Cystic Fibrosis as a disease and the complexities and complications that accompany a diagnosis for not just the patient but for their friends, family, and care team as well. It also explores what it means to truly live and make the most out of life no matter how many years we are given. But Salt In My Soul is also a documentary about what it means to search for hope and answers not only for yourself but for others as well. Even if those answers and that hope come too late for you and your family.

While I knew going into this that Mallory Smith had died, I found myself so caught up in her journey and her continued perseverance, that I kept hoping that some way, somehow, Mallory Smith would show up in the end, healthy and talking about all the amazing places life had taken her.  But that is a testament to the power that this story has and a reminder of the legacies we can leave for others to discover and be inspired by.

Salt In My Soul i s out now and available on VOD and TVOD and will be available on DVD on March 15, 2022.

Darcy Staniforth

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Based on Mallory Smith's posthumously published memoir, Salt In My Soul offers a look inside the mind of a young woman trying to live while dying. Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, Mallory turned to a secret diary to record her thoughts.

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SALT IN MY SOUL – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Reading from her journals about living with cystic fibrosis for roughly twenty years, Mallory Smith sounds by turns pensive and fluid, her words and mood cresting and crashing in waves like the sea where she loved to surf.

“It’s hard to focus on anything else when you need to focus on breathing,” she says in the documentary Salt in My Soul , based on her posthumous 2019 memoir of the same name. “I don’t get second, third, and fourth chances. … I’m a bird, and my choices might lead me to burn, but I don’t get to rise up, untainted, ever glorious, flying freely. I’m a burning bird that won’t rise.”

In limited release this month, Salt in My Soul is heartfelt and touching as much for what it shows as what it leaves to viewers’ imaginations. Longtime producer Will Battersby ( The Spine of Night ), making his directorial debut, stitches together a portrait of Smith from her extensive journals and video diaries, as well as interviews with loved ones.

Smith died in 2017 at age 25, two months after receiving a lung transplant. Microbiologists since have named a bacteriophage (a bacteria-fighting virus) BCMallory1 after her because of an experimental treatment she tried before she died.

Smith was three when doctors diagnosed her with cystic fibrosis (CF), a hereditary disease characterized by the body’s production of heavily viscous mucus and frequent respiratory infections. The median life expectancy at the time was 18. “I felt like my daughter just got a death sentence,” her father says.

Hitting various points in Smith’s life, Salt in My Soul sometimes feels like a stone skipping across a pond. Battersby and Smith’s family and friends skim over some undoubtedly wrenching times, such as Smith’s diagnosis following her mother ending a pregnancy because the fetus had CF. Some viewers also may wonder how the Smiths earned a living during their daughter’s frequent and extensive hospital stays.

Yet chronic illness and disability don’t choose whom to strike, a point that Salt in My Soul subtly makes through its matter-of-fact tone about Smith’s difficulties and medical care. When not on IV antibiotics for an infection that plagued her since she was twelve, she’d take dozens of pills daily and wear a vibrating vest while inhaling medication to dislodge the mucus in her lungs.

“I don’t want people looking at me and pitying me, or being scared I’m going to drop dead,” Smith says at one point. In another, she notes how she constantly toes the line between accepting her illness and fighting it, striving for more, then being happy with what she can do.

Smith graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University and worked as a writer and environmental storyteller. One of her projects, Biome , drew intriguing parallels between stewardship for the environment and her body as an ecosystem.

She thought that her spirit was strong but her body was fragile, despite being tall, blond, and athletic. “People seek denial, reassurance in my appearance, but looks are deceiving,” she says.

Moving at a brisk pace, Salt in My Soul strikes a graceful balance, culminating in loved ones reading her words aloud, fighting back tears. Before then, it doesn’t wallow in Smith’s low points or enshrine her as an “inspiration,” a term often rankling for people living with disabilities. Rather, it centers itself on her voice and viewpoint, her determination not to let her illness define her while grappling with her ambitions and mortality.

“CF has given me my value system, and ultimately, no matter how hard it is, I’m grateful for it,” she says. “I didn’t ask for illness, but I own it because if I don’t, no one else will.”

• ← MEAT LOAF: IN SEARCH OF PARADISE (2007) – Retroview by Jennifer Merin
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Valerie Kalfrin

Valerie Kalfrin is an award-winning crime journalist turned freelance film writer whose work appears at RogerEbert.com, In Their Own League, Script, The Hollywood Reporter, and other outlets. Also a screenwriter and script consultant, she’s passionate about challenging stereotypes about gender and disability. Let’s tell better stories and tell stories better.

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Review: ‘Salt In My Soul’ is inspiration through posthumous eloquence.

SALT IN MY SOUL

Based on the bestselling posthumously published memoir of the same name,  SALT IN MY SOUL is a documentary and classic coming of age story about a young woman figuring out how to live while dying. Mallory Smith was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at the age of three. In her twenty-five-year battle with the deadly disease, she carved out a life that most of us don’t come close to. Using Mallory’s posthumously published 2500-page secret diaries, hundreds of hours of newly discovered footage, and audio recordings, the film offers Mallory as the narrator of her own extraordinary chronicle.

Be warned that the film does involve scenes of surgery. They can be a bit intense if you are squeamish. Salt In My Soul predominantly shows Mallory and her family teaching us to celebrate and fight for life. The timing of this doc is more impactful given the current state of the world. The importance of masks for the immunocompromised has never been more relevant. An unfathomable number of us have been closer to death in the past two years than we ever thought possible Mallory’s message of living each moment to its fullest could not resonate more than in this moment in time.  Salt In My Soul  is a unique film. Undeniably intimate and relentlessly moving, it’s a film that stays with you.

A Feature Documentary Film by Will Battersby Run time: 96 Minutes (USA- Feature Documentary)

SALT IN MY SOUL will be released theatrically in New York (Cinema Village) and Los Angeles (Laemmle Royal) on January 21 followed by the VOD Release in the US, Canada, and UK & Ireland and key territories worldwide on January 25.

VOD Platforms: 

US- Apple TV/iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Microsoft/Xbox, Vudu Canada- Apple TV/iTunes, Microsoft/Xbox UK- Apple TV/iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Microsoft/Xbox Ireland- Apple TV/iTunes, Google Play

Cable Platforms: 

US- InDemand TVOD (Comcast, Spectrum, Cox), DirectTV/AT&T, and more 

ABOUT THE BOOK

SALT IN MY SOUL: An Unfinished Life, by Mallory Smith, is a powerful, intimate, and inspiring portrait of a brave young woman living with chronic illness.  Mallory understood that patient voices need to be amplified in order to improve healthcare, that the intersection  of human behavior and nature is critical to environmental sustainability, and that love and friendship give life meaning. As Mallory’s body deteriorated, she sharpened her mind, crystallized her thinking, and honed her writing skills. In her 2500 pages of private journal entries, she created poetry out of prosaic experiences.  Beautifully written, provocative, and peppered with insights, SALT IN MY SOUL reminds us to follow Mallory’s mantra and “Live Happy.”  

For more information about the book SALT IN MY SOUL: An Unfinished Life please go to:  https://www. penguinrandomhouse.com/books/ 607965/salt-in-my-soul-by- mallory-smith/

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