Darkest Miriam

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Darkest Miriam
Directed byNaomi Jaye
Written byNaomi Jaye
Based onThe Incident Report by Martha Baillie
Produced by Julie Baldassi
Brian Robertson
Starring Britt Lower
Tom Mercier
Sook-Yin Lee
Jean Yoon
CinematographyMichael LeBlanc
Edited byLev Lewis
Music by Eliza Niemi
Louie Short
Production
companies
Younger Daughter Films
Low End
Through The Lens Entertainment
Distributed byGame Theory Films
Release date
  • June 9, 2024 (2024-06-09)(Tribeca)
Running time
87 minutes
CountryCanada
LanguageEnglish

Darkest Miriam is a 2024 Canadian drama film, directed by Naomi Jaye. [1] Adapted from Martha Baillie's novel The Incident Report, [2] the film stars Britt Lower as Miriam, a librarian in Toronto who leads a closed-off, grief-stricken life after her father's death; 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. [3]

Contents

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. [4] American filmmaker Charlie Kaufman is an executive producer. [5]

Distribution

The film premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, [6] and had its Canadian premiere at the 28th Fantasia International Film Festival, [3] where it won the 2024 DGC Best Director prize.

It later screened in the Borsos Competition program at the 2024 Whistler Film Festival. [7]

Critical response

Caryn James of The Hollywood Reporter called the film a "small wonder", writing, "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." [1]

Josh Korngut of Exclaim! gave the film a mixed review, writing, "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." [3]

For Screen Anarchy , Olga Artemyeva wrote, "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." [8]

Awards

At Fantasia, Jaye won the Directors Guild of Canada award for best direction in a Canadian film. [9]

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References

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