Darkest Miriam
Miriam Gordon (Britt Lower, TV's 'Severance') is a friendless librarian who spends her days reading for children, manning the information desk and filing incident reports about the frequent odd occurrences in Toronto's Allan Garden branch. She is grief stricken over the suicide of her father and begins to find threatening letters at work that appear to have knowledge of not only her, but she and her dad's relationship. She eats a brown bag lunch on a park bench, but it isn't until she's knocked off her bike and spends the evening in a construction dig that she notices and falls in love with the Slovenian cabbie, Janko Priajtelj (Tom Mercier, "Synonyms," "The Animal Kingdom"), who also sits there and will call her "Darkest Miriam."
Laura's Review: B
Adapting Martha Baillie's novel 'The Incident Report,' writer/director Naomi Jaye attains a similar mood to last year's "Sometimes I Think About Dying," albeit one decidedly darker and more melancholy. The unconventional pairing of Lower and Mercier works exceptionally well, the immigrant artist patiently helping the closed off woman to open up. The music of Verdi's 'Rigoletto' is threaded throughout in various forms as well as being thematically woven into the story.
Miriam is chosen by regular patron Natalie (Jaimara Beals, TV's 'From') to report a pair of dentures abandoned on a bookshelf, their retrieval resulting in yet another incident as the Unusually Pale Female Patron (Susannah Hoffmann) snatches them and runs away. In the voiceover which dominates the early part of the film, Miriam will introduce the entirety of her orbit, including colleague Susu Leung (Sook-Yin Lee, "Shortbus"), branch manager Irene (Jean Yoon, TV's 'Kim's Convenience'), Suitcase Man (Clyde Whitham), Piano Girl (Sarah Li Wen Du) and Piano Mom (Anita Yung), Beautiful Young Man (Joshua Odjick), Desperate Man (Danté Prince) and Fainting Man (Igor Shamuilov), an immigrant who cannot afford the health care to address his condition.
After filing an incident report about a man caught masturbating onto a book, Miriam finds a disturbing, hand written letter on her cart which states 'you can't even take care of your own daughter, can you?' and 'I am Rigoletto.' When she hears music from the opera emanating from the piano room, Piano Mom tells her they just found the sheet music there and her daughter decided to try it, but it isn't until Miriam finds a second, more threatening, letter and reports it to Irene that we learn her dad took her to see the opera, in which Rigoletto inadvertently causes his daughter's death, as a child.
The title of Part Two, 'I Can't Stand the Sight of So Many Books,' alludes to Miriam's father having hung himself in the garage where he stored his large literary collection, Miriam frequently imagining his feet swinging between her library stacks. After spending the night in that construction dig, Miriam goes to a clinic, where she is hesitant to provide her father's name and can only think of Irene as an emergency contact. It is after this that she will acknowledge Janko, sitting reading a Slovenian children's book on an opposite park bench. Invited to his home, he reveals his artworks, turned towards the wall so as not to scare people, and Miriam stares into their darkness, like that of the pit she spent the night in. But there were stars overhead that night and just when it appears Miriam will flee, instead she will surprise both us and Janko.
But as Miriam begins to open up, the subject of fatherhood crops up again, Miriam seeing a future that upsets Janko and her foresight proves correct in an unexpected way. Lower paints a beautiful portrait of a haunted woman who suffers terribly before finding the courage to set herself free. This offbeat Canadian character study won't satisfy those who like their mysteries solved, but should cast a spell on those open to its unique vibes.
Game Theory opens "Darkest Miriam" in NY on 4/4/25 and releases it to VOD on 4/15/25.
