An enigmatic title for an enigmatic film, Darkest Miriam is a puzzling almost 1990s-style drama. It’s a showcase for Britt Lower, star of Severance on TV, who carries the entire movie with a cryptic and compelling performance. And it grew out of a short, Miriam’s World, conceived as an art installation, so there’s a touch of arthouse aridity. That said, director Naomi Jaye isn’t rolling around in it. There is the sense that she’s keeping the weird in check.
Lower plays a competent but withdrawn librarian whose daily life of almost eccentric normality is disrupted when she spots a guy, who turns out to be a Slovenian called Janko (Tom Mercier), on a bench just along from where she eats her sandwiches every day. Miriam’s life is about to change and the movie tells us so distinctly. In Part One (The Events Leading Up to the Fall, the on-screen title card says) we learn about Miriam’s daily life and the regulars at the library – she’s given them all nickname like Fainting Man, John B and Desperate Man, because getting to know their real names is a bridge too far. After she meets Janko – more or less forces herself on him in her own oblique way – the film shifts into Part Two (I Cannot Stand the Sight of So Many Books). Things start to fall apart.
Who is this solitary woman? What’s going on? Is Miriam’s voiceover telling us everything we need to know? The vaguely threatening notes referencing the opera Rigoletto which Miriam starts finding inside library books – what are those about? Little scenes from the opera itself being staged out in the park – figments of Miriam’s hyperactive imagination? The fact that the soprano in Rigoletto meets a tragic operatic end – how important is that?
Films that ask questions in a teasing attempt to be mysterious and enigmatic often fall flat on their face, but Lower stops that happening by steering away from the cute. Mercier plays along with Lower and stays away from the quirky, delivering a vivid and likeable performance as Janko. But mostly the film is with Miriam, who cannot quite look people in the eye and works in a library because it keeps her away from confrontation, we sense. There is something not quite right with her. She is damaged. Janko works it out early on but he clearly thinks whatever is going on in this beautiful and sweet woman’s head it’s a price worth paying to be with her.
Is it significant that Charlie Kaufman has an executive producer credit on this movie? This often means nothing at all apart from a wedge of cash but Kaufman doesn’t lend his name to things very often. The story of Miriam and Janko is told in an almost abstract way. There’s a sense of disengagement, and people connecting across a chasm is something you get in his movies. Darkest Miriam may not quite have the narrative flow of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but there is something of their offbeat dystopian worldview in the way it plays out.
If this were a 1990s movie the voiceover would make eccentric suggestions, there’d be on-screen overlays of flowers or other graphics and there’d be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl somewhere, a “saviour” role Janko looks like he’s going to fulfil though he doesn’t quite.
Don’t expect jokes. Shot in a muted soft palette leaning away from a “look at me” aesthetic, this is in many ways a film about nothing. Then something. Then nothing again. Jaye explores storytelling that is less about narrative and more about scene-setting and mood. Eventually she tosses us a lump of narrative meat, so that things can pay off after all the set-up – which they do beautifully. Up till then, this largely eventless drama rolls along on Lower’s performance. If you only know her from Severance, it’s quite a revelation.
Darkest Miriam – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
