Don Shanahan
Libraries are crossroads of eras and cultures with a wide range of both available knowledge and types of folks tapping into those resources. With their orderly arrangements and data-driven systems, libraries are places of meticulousness and, therefore, it takes meticulous people to work at and maintain them. Librarians then become the stewards and arbiters of these places. Our central protagonist and title character of Darkest Miriam from Game Theory Films is a librarian. Consider for a moment the various people a librarian would have to commiserate with on a given day and you step gingerly into this world.
Remember, there are no class or social delineations in public libraries. Libraries are shared spaces for a myriad of quirky topics and people. They’ll welcome everyone from a refined consumer of academic privilege to a homeless denizen trying to buy time out of the elements with an available bathroom for unmet basic needs. Manning their posts and maintaining the materials and facilities, imagine the odd stuff librarians see, encounter, circumvent, reconcile, and clean.
In tracing that kind of daily pattern, Darkest Miriam offers a peek into the unflattering daily routines of the typical trope of a mousy and meticulous librarian. Miriam Gordon, played by Severance star Britt Lower with an attire of frumpy clothes crowned by red hair with drastic bangs, works at the Allan Gardens Branch of the Toronto Public Library system. She’s clearly a keen observer. Miriam knows her red flag and yellow flag regulars and, in her internal monologue, she assigns them with nicknames and backstories, while assuming her desk duties, teaching youth classes, and writing frequent incident reports for her oblivious co-workers and superiors (embodied by Sook-Yin Lee and Jean Yoon).
On the surface with Miriam, all that’s missing is a pull-string voice box shushing patrons and a pair of chained reading glasses draped over her shoulders and the bridge of her nose. Alas, we quickly learn there’s more to her than it seems in Darkest Miriam. When she leaves the library, we see two halves of her personal life. On the brighter side, Miriam enjoys riding her bike as a green commuter and reading for pleasure in the nearby park containing the beautiful Allan Gardens Conservatory. When she leaves the sunny outdoors, Miriam retreats into hermetic and unmarried solitude at her apartment, nearly regressing back to the nebbish spinster stereotype attached to her chosen profession.
Those two shadings of her life are titillated, in you will, by two very different swerves that transpire in Darkest Miriam. One day relaxing by the conservatory, she has the dullest “Meet Cute” over the topic of opera books with a European immigrant painter and taxi driver named Janko (Tom Mercier of The Animal Kingdom). Clicking as standoffish introverts, they immediately (and I mean immediately) become feverish romantic lovers. Meanwhile, back at the library, Miriam begins finding hidden handwritten letters in the books and shelves. They are elaborately written and dark in detail. They seem to speak about private things only she would know or are happening to her with matching specificity.
These divergent paths for discovery in Darkest Miriam spur conflicting reactions and evolutions within Miriam over the course of the film. Her passionate affair with Janko bucks prior prudish expectations hypothesized about Miriam. Long-lost happiness lifts her like never before. Yet, the eerie mystery of the recurring letters casts shadows of doubt to her growing happiness and festers unsafe anxiety about what is happening at work and who is behind it.
Even if you personally find them superficially plain or boring in real life, a library being used as a film setting, as it is by debuting feature director Naomi Jaye, almost always lends itself to the robust cinematography. Director of photography Michael LeBlanc (Tenzin) finds the photogenic breadth for light and shadows in the broad open spaces which pair with the sensitive audio expectations of stillness and a low environmental volume. The library’s signature tall shelves and stacks create linear symmetry, enveloping intimacy, and automatic framing for LeBlanc following vertical subjects with the camera. Simply put, subjects look notably more interesting in libraries than often other indoor places.
For Darkest Miriam, this is an ideal setting for a simmering thriller. Thanks to those disturbing letters and the eccentric citizens seeming to orbit our librarian lead, there’s a growing sense of waiting and wondering for something bad to happen. Adding to the uneasy hush is how blank and esoteric Janko is in stature. He counts as a question mark all his own. With their classical orchestral work filling the background score, first-time feature film composers Eliza Niemi and Louis Short tune the collective tension to a calibration of quiet dread.
In different hands, Darkest Miriam would be electrified with jump scares, score stingers, some kind of physical climax, and a denouement of nefariously revealed evil. We know that’s unrealistic and so does writer/director Naomi Jaye, adapting Martha Baillie’s 2009 novel The Incident Report for a second and larger time after her Miriam’s World multi-screen experiment in 2019. Its throughline of silent pessimism and layered grief makes any swings towards success or failure far more reachable and tangible. There’s an unusual calmness to that approach.
Unfortunately, the other by-product of Darkest Miriam’s low-key course is a muddle of bewildering minimalism. The puzzle of the letters, which should be a source of tingling excitement at some level or point, loses attention and impact when the love story takes over. Try as she may to break down stigmas and fully create a dynamic character, Britt Lower’s adhesion to the dread born of loneliness and isolation may be too heavy to bear or overcome. When more of Darkest Miriam’s time is spent on the character’s journey with Janko—which, granted, counts as an angle of levity—any heat of passion is made lukewarm by the coldness of the inescapable despair of it all. Even though the scrupulous visual edge is present, we’re trapped waiting and wondering with an unsatisfied curiosity.
