[Tribeca 2024] DARKEST MIRIAM -- Vexing, Unfocused Romcom Muddles Emotional Core

Review by Daniel Lima

There is something commendable in attempting to capture intangible human emotions and experiences through layers of inscrutable abstraction. Darkest Miriam tackles grief, depression, and alienation with a degree of cool removal that is, if nothing else, more interesting than the conventional form a story like this might usually take. Even so, its form ultimately fails to complement the character — and the performance — at its center.
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Britt Lower stars as Miriam, a woman living a painfully lonely and unfulfilling existence. Her job at the local library sees her dealing with inane complaints, crotchety locals, and demeaning tasks all day. She has no hobbies, no friends, and is grappling with trauma that has isolated her from the world around her. A chance connection at a park with a local cab driver sees some light shine into her dreary life, even as she begins to find increasingly threatening letters at work that seem directed at her.

There is a world where this takes on a certain darkly quirky tone, which is uncommon among indie romcoms. Instead, Darkest Miriam does its best to resist categorization, more or less abandoning a coherent and propulsive narrative structure for what amounts to a series of encounters meant to evoke familiar feelings in anyone trying to eke out a comfortable living in modern society.

The time spent in the library is a series of unpleasant, disconnected scenes capturing the feeling of constraint and claustrophobia when working someplace that exacerbates how miserable you feel. While the time spent with Lower and her lover is more freeing and happier by an order of magnitude, they are not concerned with building to a dramatic high point or even charting the course of a traditional courtship. They are merely snapshots of an intimate relationship, an escape from the disaffecting drudgery of everyday life.

Unfortunately, that lack of focus is a double-edged sword. While the attempt to cultivate an atmosphere around the character of Miriam is commendable, it never properly defines her to begin with. This is not a particularly esoteric film, but the lack of a traditional narrative, with peaks and valleys and things that characters are forced to react to, means the sole point of interest is in its lead. Despite all the time spent with her, however, she is mostly a cipher, ill-defined beyond a pervading sense of sadness when she's not with her new beau.

Perhaps most damning is how leaden the central romance actually is. Though Lower and Tom Mercier (as the cab driver) are doing what is called of them in a film as low-key as this, it can't be said that the two have chemistry, nor is there any charge to the conversations they have with one another. The lack of narrative build clearly works against them here, as without the structure it would provide, the emotional core of the movie rides on how much one gets out of the two reading books to each other or Lower giving Mercier a bath as they exchange dead stares.

Even so, the vexing, dreamlike quality of Darkest Miriam may ultimately be more helpful than harmful. It's hard to imagine that a more conventional approach to the material — requiring a defter hand at defining characters and writing dialogue — would have played to the filmmaker's strengths, and it certainly would not have distinguished itself among its peers. For those looking for an offbeat, darker take on the rom-com and have exhausted every other option, this may scratch a certain itch. ​

Darkest Miriam is screening at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 5-16 in New York City.

Rating: 2/5