Although we are told not to judge a book by its cover, filmmaker Naomi Jaye couldn’t help but gravitate towards The Incident Report by Martha Baillie because of its polished design. Standing in that bookstore, little did she know that within those pages she would find inspiration for her latest film, Darkest Miriam, premiering in theatres on March 28. 

“I’m a very tactile person. I was like, this looks beautiful. And then after reading the first page, there was something about the voice of Miriam that really resonated with me,” Jaye says. 

Baillie’s novel isn’t told in prose, but rather through individual incident reports filed by a librarian in Toronto named Miriam. The main character details the quirky patrons she interacts with on a daily basis—Suitcase Man and Piano Girl to name a few—and recounts her love affair with a taxi driver. Although her routine is the primary focus of the book, mystery ensues when the protagonist receives threatening messages in her workplace from someone who believes that they are Rigoletto, the court jester of Verdi’s opera. 


After immediately calling the publisher to option the novel, Jaye officially began what would be a decade-long journey to adapt it for the screen. At the time, she hadn’t even released The Pin, her feature directorial debut. It was also her first time adapting a book, and she initially struggled to separate the story she read from the story she wanted to tell. It was only after hearing advice from someone she met at a film lab in Turin, Italy that she figured out what to do. 

“I was working with someone who was very familiar with adaptation. What she kept on telling me was, just forget the book. Drop the book. You have to make this into a film. A book and a film are not the same thing,” she says. 

Setting the book aside led her to a breakthrough in the writing process. Throughout Darkest Miriam, the main character finds herself often resorting to a massive underground hole (a detail included by Jaye), which functions as both a physical hiding place and a metaphor for her unresolved trauma. Although Miriam initially seems to be content with her simple everyday affairs at the library, viewers soon come to notice that she’s still broken from her father’s death. 

As the film calibrates both Miriam’s internal anguish and her budding romance with Janko (Tom Mercier), Jaye wanted to show how the protagonist could “be experiencing the most beautiful thing and the most painful thing at the same time.” Severance’s Britt Lower plays the lead and it is through her portrayal that Miriam’s sense of happiness and heartbreak are apparent. Jaye recalls watching Lower in the hit Apple TV + series and immediately envisioning her as the tragic heroine of her film.

“There’s something so feral and fearless about her performance. I was like, yeah, I want her. She liked the project. We spoke and we got on like a house on fire,” she says. 

Although it took years for Darkest Miriam to go from page to screen, Jaye’s dedication to this project is visible from the very first frame. The director not only wrote the script and led the set, but she was crucial in finding the right filming locations to make Miriam’s world just as captivating as it was described in the novel. While certain scenes were shot at McMaster University, others were filmed at a space where a library was built from the ground up.

“The outside of the library was a storefront we found that Brendan Callaghan, who’s an incredible production designer, transformed into a library. Obviously, there were lots of reference images going back and forth about what this would look like, but…it works beautifully in the end, and you get this gift that is unexpected.”

As Darkest Miriam opens the Canadian Film Fest and heads to theatres this week, Jaye can finally close this chapter and embark on her next creative ventures. She’s now crafting a “human-powered installation” about Parkinson’s disease, expected to open to the public in Summer 2026, and she is working on another film. 

“I have a project that’s at the very early stages called The Common Father, about a woman who travels to discover the truth about her father,” Jaye says.

Catch an advance screening of Darkest Miriam at TIFF Lightbox before its theatrical release on March 28.