Darkest Miriam

Darkest Miriam is a 2024 Canadian drama film, directed by Naomi Jaye. Adapted from Martha Baillie's novel The Incident Report, the film stars Britt Lower as Miriam, a librarian in Toronto who leads a closed-off, grief-stricken life after the death of her father; amid a series of strange incidents at the library, she meets and begins a romance with Janko (Tom Mercier), a Slovenian immigrant who opens her up to new possibilities.

Darkest Miriam
Directed by	Naomi Jaye
Written by	Naomi Jaye
Based on	The Incident Report by Martha Baillie
Produced by	Julie Baldassi Brian Robertson
Starring	Britt Lower Tom Mercier Sook-Yin Lee Jean Yoon
Cinematography	Michael LeBlanc
Edited by	Lev Lewis
Music by	Eliza Niemi Louie Short
Production companies	Younger Daughter Films Low End
Distributed by	Game Theory Films
Release date	June 9, 2024 (2024-06-09) (Tribeca)
Running time	87 minutes
Country	Canada
Language	English

The cast also includes Sook-Yin Lee, Jean Yoon, Jaimara Beals, Clyde Whitham, Susannah Hoffmann, Scott McCulloch, Igor Shamuilov, Joshua Odjick, Sarah Li Wen Du, Anita Yung, Peter Millard, Danté Prince, Scott Ryan Yamamura, Jamaal Grant, Aviva Armour-Ostroff and Laura Afelskie.

Production

The film began production in 2022 in Toronto and Hamilton, initially as The Incident Report. American filmmaker Charlie Kaufman signed on as executive producer.

Distribution

The film premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, and had its Canadian premiere at the 2024 Fantasia Film Festival.

Critical response

Caryn James of The Hollywood Reporter called the film a "small wonder", and wrote that "there is a dramatic turn at the end that we don’t see coming, and Lower allows us to feel Miriam’s deep emotional pain, yet the film ends with Miriam pointed toward the future. That mix of the tragic and the hopeful is just the kind of off-kilter balance that makes the film so exceptional and compelling. Charlie Kaufman has lent his name to the project as an executive producer, and while there is a definite sympathy between his imaginative approach and hers, Jaye’s artistry comes through as purely hers, a true discovery."

Josh Korngut of Exclaim! gave the film a mixed review, writing that "unfortunately, the film's precociousness bogs it down. Stylistically, Darkest Miriam feels a bit like an approximation of Atom Egoyan, broken into chapters and labelled with pretentious, overly flowery subheadings. Style sometimes suffocates substance to the point that the film occasionally feels more like a Harbourfront modern dance piece than it does an engaging drama with burnt edges. All in all, Darkest Miriam is a somewhat fresh and strange character study worth watching for audiences with the right threshold for arthouse vagueness. Thankfully, Lower's title performance elevates the material, and Jaye's direction shows very real promise."

For Screen Anarchy, Olga Artemyeva wrote that "the film gives us a gentle love story, but it also features a very distinctive artistic voice and style, where opera outbursts and unexpected stills of plants in the middle of the story feel like an organic part of the intricate cinematic language. Like several other films at the Tribeca Film Festival, Darkest Miriam – while aesthetically very different from them – reflects on the necessity to let go of things, both painful and wonderful. As Jaye’s movie also talks about art and its influence on how we perceive things, it also seems to frame the same idea this way: the painting of one's life can be dark or light, can be any texture, style or genre – just maybe don’t let it become a still life."

External links

• Darkest Miriam at IMDb