Darkest Miriam (UK Premiere)

Part of Dundead Film Festival 2025 - see the full programme and book a Festival Pass.

Severance star Britt Lower gives a mesmerising and nuanced performance in this strange and unsettling film from director Naomi Jaye, based on the novel The Incident Report by Martha Baillie. The presence of Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, I’m Thinking of Ending Things) among the film’s executive producers might give you an idea of the kind of mind-shifting filmmaking to expect, but Jaye’s approach is simultaneously more subtle and more intimate than the kind of film Kaufman has become known for. 

Lower plays Miriam, a Toronto librarian whose life has become a lonely catalogue of the mundane. Miriam’s interiority is seemingly reflected in the grey, public-building-functionality of her library, but her liminal reality is shattered when she tentatively embarks on an uncertain romance and starts receiving mysterious threatening letters. 

Like All of Us Strangers, this is a deeply-felt portrait of a uniquely modern isolation, which treads lightly into psychological horror to explore the mind of its central character. And while there are recognisable influences in the film, it is a singular piece; as The Hollywood Reporter put it “Jaye’s artistry comes through as purely hers, a true discovery.” It is a slippery film which eludes easy categorisation, and Lower puts her all into her fearless performance. Just like its protagonist, this is a film which exists in the places between and offers a deep well of emotion beneath its sad surface.