TORONTO — Leaving behind the sterile office corridors of “Severance,” Britt Lower pedalled through Toronto's bustling streets in order to find her character’s pulse for “Darkest Miriam.”
Directed by Naomi Jaye, the brooding and quirky Canadian drama is adapted from Martha Baillie’s Giller Prize-shortlisted novel “The Incident Report,” which draws on the author’s own experiences as a Toronto librarian.
Lower stars as Miriam Gordon, an introverted librarian at the city’s Allan Gardens branch, who moves through a haze of melancholy while serving those on the fringes of society.
The actor shared that while Baillie’s book helped her understand Miriam’s “inner life,” it was the city’s roadways that truly anchored her in the protagonist’s world.
“I had the physical job of biking around Toronto and feeling what it was like to be someone who gets around the city on her bicycle,” says Lower, who lives in New York, praising Toronto's roads with bike lanes for allowing cyclists and cars to "move in perfect harmony."
“There's a toughness to the commuter culture whenever you're commuting in a city on a bicycle... It takes, I think, a level of bravery and a kind of toughness that gave me an insight into how she is protecting herself with her helmet and her big backpack, but then she falls into this construction hole that she has no idea has been dug in front of her home.”
Though construction-related headaches are a familiar frustration for Torontonians, the accident serves as a turning point for Miriam, triggering an emotional shift. During a hospital checkup the next day, she's asked questions she refuses to answer, including whether she's ever experienced suicidal thoughts.
“Falling into that hole really cracks her open and opens her up to the world around her,” says Lower, best known for playing Helly R. on Apple TV Plus’ hit sci-fi show “Severance.”
“Darkest Miriam” hits Canadian theatres Friday and opened the Canadian Film Fest earlier this week.
“I just love Canada,” says Lower, who’s from Illinois and spent lots of time in Toronto filming the FX comedy “Man Seeking Woman,” which aired from 2015 to 2017.
During her lunch breaks, Miriam retreats to Allan Gardens, a park and botanical garden in the city's east end, where she crosses paths with Janko, a Slovenian taxi driver played by Tom Mercier, and the two begin a relationship. Lower recalls spending much of her own downtime in Toronto’s green spaces while filming in 2022, including a sprawling Queen West park known for attracting downtowners and a famously pale rodent.
“I love Trinity Bellwoods. I have spotted the albino squirrels. It's a great city.”
Jaye remembers discovering Baillie’s novel in a bookstore and feeling instantly captivated. As soon as she bought it, she contacted the publisher, declaring her intent to adapt the book into a film.
“It was just the way Miriam saw the world and the way that she interacted with the people in the library and the strangeness of those experiences. It just felt so engaging and very familiar,” says Jaye, who made her filmmaking debut in 2013 with Second World War-set romantic drama “The Pin.”
Screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman, a friend and fan of Baillie’s, lends his name to “Darkest Miriam” as an executive producer.
Miriam dryly chronicles the library’s regulars, filing reports on every disturbance. She notes Suitcase Man, who never parts with his luggage, and Fainting Man, a new immigrant with no health coverage.
Jaye explains that the film captures how “librarians are now also social workers.”
"Libraries are these spaces that hold the stories of our culture. They hold our history and they hold the last place of an actual public space that you can occupy in a big city," adds Lower.
She notes that these spaces offer society’s most vulnerable a rare refuge where they can use the internet or rest without having to spend money.
Jaye says what keeps Miriam at the library is trauma stemming from her relationship with her father, who was obsessed with books.
“She replicates her father's circumstance,” she says.
“She ends up working in a library surrounding herself with books, listening to other people's stories instead of creating her own story. So it really is this prison that she makes for herself and the story is how she breaks out of it.”
The theme of self-imposed confinement may bring to mind “Severance,” where characters grapple with separating their personal and professional lives, trapped in an environment they’ve unintentionally created for themselves.
While Lower tends to “compartmentalize” her characters, she finds a parallel between the two projects.
“There's the world of the office and the world of the library, these workspaces that we all have some kind of relationship to,” she reflects.
“Even if we don't work in a library or an office, we all have some kind of universal relationship to both spaces.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 28, 2025.
Alex Nino Gheciu, The Canadian Press
