Darkest Miriam follows the title character (Britt Lower) as she navigates a heady stew of grief, trauma and loneliness while working as a librarian in downtown Toronto.Courtesy of Game Theory
Darkest Miriam
Written and directed by Naomi Jaye
Starring Britt Lower, Tom Mercier and Sook-Yin Lee
Classification N/A; 87 minutes
Premiered March 24 at Toronto’s Canadian Film Fest; opens in select theatres March 28
Crocodile Eyes
Directed by Ingrid Veninger
Classification N/A; 75 minutes
Premieres March 28 at Canadian Film Fest, Scotiabank Theatre
If one were to judge the national mood by the comments underneath The Globe and Mail’s film and television coverage, than domestic audiences have never been more primed than now to abandon Hollywood and rediscover (or simply discover) Canadian entertainment. To that end, the 19th edition of the Canadian Film Fest – which has been running all this week, wrapping on Saturday – should be the talk of the town, given that it exclusively programs movies made by Canadians, largely within the Canadian system. But just in case the CFF has fallen off your radar or never quite climbed onto it, there are two festival selections that deserve your attention, tariffs or no tariffs.
The first is also by far the CFF’s easiest programming sell, Darkest Miriam. And while it might sound odd to call a movie that prominently features death, masturbation and mental illness as something that’s close to “sellable,” Darkest Miriam has one big casting coup at its centre: Britt Lower. When the actress started filming Darkest Miriam in and around Toronto in the summer of 2022, much of the world either had not heard or at least had not begun to binge-watch Severance, the surreal Apple TV+ series in which Lower co-stars as a disaffected employee of a mysterious mega-corporation. But today, Severance is a genuine pop-culture phenomenon, earning as many memes as it does awards, which should deliver some deserved eyeballs to Lower’s humble new Canadian film.
Adapted from Martha Baillie’s 2009 novel The Incident Report, Darkest Miriam follows the title character (Lower) as she navigates a heady stew of grief, trauma and loneliness while working as a librarian in downtown Toronto. Seemingly content to accept the reality that she will spend her days dealing with mentally troubled patrons and a robotic municipal bureaucracy, Miriam is on a fast track to nowhere. Until the day she sparks up a hesitant romance with the equally lonely Janko (Tom Mercier), who begins to slowly crack Miriam’s rock-hard emotional shell.
Filmmaker Ingrid Veninger’s latest work, Crocodile Eyes, is a deeply personal and bold docu-dogme film that unflinchingly captures the raw cycles of life, death, and family with honesty and poignant vulnerability.Supplied
Written and directed by Naomi Jaye, Darkest Miriam is alternately electric and inert. The film’s vignettes of life inside the Toronto Public Library system are gently funny and manic, without ever being mean or crass, with Jaye careful to populate Miriam’s workplace with skilled comic co-stars (including Sook-Yin Lee and Jean Yoon). Yet so much of Miriam’s dreary inner life feels overly familiar to any scholar of a particular kind of low-budget movie – character studies in which trauma is treated as an easy algorithmic keyword, rather than a theme to be genuinely expanded upon.
The film’s world opens up considerably once Lower is able to bounce her energy off of Mercier – the two create an odd-couple dynamic that feels real, and at times utterly romantic. And even when it is only Lower onscreen, the actress is still capable of shouldering much of the script’s thinly layered emotional weight. So much so that her performance is enough to sell Darkest Miriam whether it’s Canadian or not.
A more experimental and challenging film, one resting at the opposite end of the CFF programming, is Ingrid Veninger’s latest docu-fiction hybrid, Crocodile Eyes. Inspired by her granddaughter’s candid inquisitiveness, Veninger shapes her experimental film as a bold and profound quest to capture 100 “real” moments. But the truth that is captured by a camera and the truth that is experienced in our day-to-day lives can often be two very different things, which is what makes Veninger’s eighth film so raw and unflinching: the border between the “real” and the “cinematic” simply does not exist in the director’s world.
As the long-hailed “queen of DIY filmmaking” goes about collecting cycle-of-life moments that are as authentic as they are unforgettable – including the birth of her grandchild and the death of her father, both documented on film in what feels like real time – Veninger stitches together a film that feels so fiercely alive it threatens to almost combust right off the screen.
While the result can sometimes appear as if though it’s a collection of craftily staged home movies stitched together, it only takes a few scenes to become fully locked into Veninger’s personal life, which is in turn her artistic life, too – an entire world, ready to be screened for anyone similarly curious and creative when it comes to the human condition. How very, well, Canadian.
