Miriam Is Going to Mars

I'm a bit biased when it comes to Miriam is Going to Mars because I am a huge, HUGE fan of Ann Sonneville's and felt it was worth every penny I spent making a day trip to Montreal to see it as part of the 2017 Fantasia International Film Festival's Sci-Fi Shorts Showcase--and not just because it was my first time seeing her on the big screen either.

Sonneville, who you might remember as Laura in that One-A-Day Vitacraves for Women commercial from a few years back, plays Miriam Johnson, a schizophrenic patient who repeatedly hears voices and frequently wears a pair of unplugged headphones to try to calm them down. One day she becomes intrigued when she stumbles across a news report about an American rocket manufacturer that has invested tons of money into a program to colonize Mars and is currently narrowing down the selection of potential candidates for the mission. Miriam wants to take her son Thomas along, and figures that all she has to do is submit an application video to the company and then escape the mental health facility where she has been staying; only then, she hopes, will she be able to leave the voices behind. Without spoiling anything, the first half of the film, peppered with a few flashbacks that establish her backstory, is about her making her submission to the company; the second half is about how she deals with the company's decision in her case.

Set in Chicago, the film is more of a character study examining some of the effects of schizophrenia on not only those who suffer from it, but by extension on the people surrounding them. In the few brief scenes involving Miriam's sister Jenny, for example, you get the sense that it hasn't been easy for her to put up with Miriam's condition, especially considering that she has the added task of looking after Thomas in Miriam's absence. How Miriam deals with the full impact of that, once she eventually grasps it, is not easy to watch.

If you're a newcomer to modern shorts, as I am, you might want to watch this film many times. In my experience, shorts tend to pack a lot of backstory-establishing detail more in the visual elements than in the dialogue, and it's not always easy to grasp them all in one viewing alone--the more times you see a given short, the more of those layers you peel away, and the more gems you discover in understanding the intricacies of the plot. Miriam is no exception.

But even if you aren't a newcomer, you might want to see this film again and again. After I saw this in Montreal, I left the theater feeling those fifteen minutes weren't enough--indeed, since Tyler Roth, the colorist in the film's digital intermediate team, posted Miriam to Vimeo in the last week or so I've come to feel that this is a film I can watch over and over and over again and never ever get tired of it. But of course that is partly the Sonneville fan in me talking. Still, as a musician and a hobbyist student of the behind-the-scenes aspects of film and TV production, I feel that this film, and Sonneville's performance in particular, are worthy of an Oscar. This is a powerful tale of schizophrenia and family that gets better with every viewing.

If you haven't seen this film yet, I highly recommend it. Watch it once and you'll want to see it again!