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After the recent announcement that Severance star Britt Lower would lead the cast for a new Netflix prison break series, the rising star has lined up yet another project, this time teaming with legendary actress Jamie Lee Curtis on a new horror film.

Per Deadline, Lower is set to lead the cast of Sender, a psychological horror film from Russell Goldman, who makes his feature directorial debut with the movie. The horror flick is based on Goldman's 2022 short film Return to Sender. Lower will star alongside David Dastmalchian, Anna Baryshnikov, and Curtis. Per the official logline, Sender follows "a woman (Lower) who experiences an e-commerce package delivery scam that becomes so personal and disturbing that she becomes hellbent on discovering the identity of her anonymous sender."

In addition to starring in the film, Curtis serves as a producer alongside Molly Hallam and Jake Katofsky, while Lower is an executive producer.

Executive produced by Charlie Kaufman and written and directed by visual artist-turned-filmmaker Naomi Jaye, Darkest Miriam shows a ton of potential. Yet, despite starring a very good Britt Lower, Darkest Miriam rides on the strength of its lead performer and atmosphere, which carry a script that is slow, meandering, and not particularly substantive.

Darkest Miriam Review

Darkest Miriam follows a librarian who, at the same time, begins to receive mysterious and vaguely threatening letters and meets a stranger with whom she finds unexpected kinship, kicking off a love affair. For the first half hour of the film, viewers will be intrigued, hoping to unravel the threads of Jaye’s narrative, but as its monotony reveals itself, they may find themselves challenged to maintain their interest in the narrative.

Courtesy of Game Theory Films RelatedSeverance Season 2 Review — Was It Worth the Wait?

The movie’s tone is very dark and pensive,...

The newest project featuring Severancestar Britt Lower premiered at the Canadian Film Festival in Toronto earlier this week. The independent film, Darkest Miriam, stars Lower as a librarian in the film by Canadian director Naomi Jaye. Per the CBC, Lower plays librarian Miriam Gordon in the drama film adapted from Martha Bailie’s novel The Incident Report. The film was released in Canada on March 28.

In Darkest Miriam, Lower’s character is overcome with grief as she deals with the death of her father. She lives quietly as a librarian at the Allan Gardens branch of the Toronto Library until her life is turned upside down after she begins receiving threatening letters. All of this coincides with a new romantic relationship with a cab driver.

It Was “Kismet”

The Severance actor, who plays “Innie” Helly R. and “Outie” Helena Eagan on the Apple TV+ series, said she connected with the...

Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent, a local adaptation of Dick Wolf’s global Law & Order TV series franchise, has nabbed a field-leading 20 nominations heading into the Canadian Screen Awards.

The Citytv series will challenge for best drama, best episode director for Sharon Lewis and Holly Dale, and best drama writing for Tassie Cameron, among other categories. The best TV drama competition also has entrants for the CBC’s Bones of Crow drama, which picked up 12 nominations, and the CBC’s police procedural Allegiance.

Other multiple nominees on the TV side include CTV’s Children Ruin Everything and CBC’s Run the Burbs with 12 mentions each, followed by the CBC’s Paris 2024 Summer Olympics telecast with 11 nominations.

In the film categories, director Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language leads the field with 13 nominations, including for best drama and best direction. Rankin’s Farsi- and French-language offbeat homage to Iranian cinema...

Exclusive: Toronto-based boutique distributor Game Theory Films has acquired Canadian rights to Captain Newfoundland, a feature documentary exploring the legacy of late idiosyncratic media mogul and mystic Geoff Stirling.

The feature, which has recently begun production, is directed by Jamie Miller and Mike Feehan and co-produced by St. John’s-based Seachange Films and Toronto-based 86 Media House.

Stirling was born in the Newfoundland and Labrador capital of St John’s in 2021 when it was still an independent province. He died in 2013.

After studies at the University of Tampa, he freelanced for Time and The Chicago Tribune, before returning home to set up the province’s first newspaper, The Newfoundland Herald, in 1946.

He went on to set up the independent TV station Ntv (Newfoundland Television) in 1955, which punched above its weight as a broadcasting pioneer in terms of its resources, becoming the first Canadian station in 1972 to broadcast around the clock.

"You'll see pretty soon what I'm capable of." Game Theory Films has unveiled a trailer for the Canadian indie film titled Darkest Miriam, the latest feature film directed by filmmaker Naomi Jaye (also of The Pin previously). This first premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival last summer, then it went on to win Best Director at the 2024 Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. Miriam Gordon lives in a fog of grief while working in a downtown public library branch. When a burgeoning love-affair coincides with her receiving a series of oddly threatening letters, Miriam's sheltered existence is cracked open. This is executive produced by Charlie Kaufman, and it's described as a Kaufman-esque little film exploring the idea "how sometimes the people we deem to have the simplest lives are actually living in their own magical worlds, filled with mysteries and odd characters." Sounds super sweet and amusing. Starring Britt Lower (known...

French epic The Count Of Monte-Cristo has won the Cheval Noir award for best film at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

The Canadian genre festival’s top prize was bestowed on directors Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre De La Patelliere at Fantasia’s jury awards ceremony on Saturday (July 27), in the middle of the festival’s July 18-Aug 4 run.

The ceremony, at Montreal’s Cinéma du Musée, was hosted by Fantasia’s artistic director and director of international programming Mitch Davis.

The Count Of Monte-Cristo, the latest screen version of Alexandre Dumas’ literary classic, made its debut out of...

Sometimes grief can leave one feeling as if one is looking at life from a distance.

Our first glimpse of Miriam (Britt Lower) is through her apartment window. She’s doing ordinary things, perhaps carrying out her morning routine, and doesn’t seem to be aware that anyone is watching. Soon she will emerge as the central subject of Naomi Jaye’s off-centre comedy drama, and yet that sense of distance will never fully go away. When we accompany her to the library where she works, she introduces us to its staff and regulars one by one, including her father – before acknowledging that he has recently died.

Screened as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, Darkest Miriam makes use of absurdist humour to explore the sense of unreality that such a bereavement can create. We see its heroine embark on a new relationship with an immigrant she meets in the park,...

Writer and director Naomi Jaye has taken the unpromising story of a soft-spoken young librarian and turned it into a small wonder of a film, eloquent and captivating. Britt Lower (Helly in Severance) is subtle but magnetic as Miriam, who works in a neighborhood library in Toronto, eating lunch alone every day in a nearby park. She seems content with her quiet life, even when wafting a little robotically through the library stacks in her oversized sweater. Whether her aura suggests sadness or complacency we don’t yet know.

The film has a definite narrative trajectory, as Miriam begins a relationship with Janko (Tom Mercier), a Slovenian taxi diver and artist who eats lunch on the park bench across from her. But its distinctive quality comes from how deftly Jaye balances that story with Miriam’s inner life. She delicately moves us in and out of Miriam’s memories and observances,...

Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival has unveiled its second wave of titles, which includes the world premiere of Ant Timpson’s “Bookworm” as the opening night film. This year’s edition, the 28th for the festival, will run from July 18 to August 4. More titles will be announced July 3.

Other world premieres included in the line-up are “The Beast Within” starring Kit Harington (“Game of Thrones”), which follows a young girl as she starts to question her atypical life in her family’s compound in England, and makes a shocking discovering about her dad; and “Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain,” with director Kenji Nakamura reviving the thrills of the original anime.

“Bookworm” stars Elijah Wood (“Yellowjackets”) and Nell Fisher (“Evil Dead Rise”). The official logline reads, “Mildred (Fisher), a precocious eleven-year-old bookworm, escapes her humdrum existence by immersing herself in novels where literary adventures abound, with a...

Infatuation turns into a sinister obsession in the upcoming indie drama “Darkest Miriam.”

Based on Martha Baillie’s novel “The Incident Report,” the film follows loner librarian Miriam Gordon, played by “Severance” actress Britt Lower, whose new affair with a taxi driver (Tom Mercier) coincides with her receiving threatening letters from a secret admirer. Could her beau also be her nemesis?

The film, written and directed by Naomi Jaye, is set to have its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival in the Viewpoints Section on Sunday, June 9.

Acclaimed filmmaker Charlie Kaufman serves as an executive producer on the film, seemingly stamping it with his signature existentialism. Kaufman joined after reading author Baillie’s other book “Sister Language.” Canadian poet Eva H.D. approached Kaufman on behalf of the production.

The official synopsis for “Darkest Miriam” reads: Miriam lives in a fog of grief while working amidst marginalized members of the public...

Deepa Mehta is set to direct “Troilokya,” a thriller about an Indian woman known to be a serial killer. Production is through pan-Asian film company Through the Lens Entertainment and India’s Open Air Films.

The story, set in 19th century Calcutta during British rule, sees a female prostitute embark on an unheard of killing spree. For more than a decade, she is hunted down by detective Priyonath Mukhopadhyay. The screenplay, written by Juhi Chaturvedi (“Piku”), navigates through eccentric relationships fraught with lust, obsession, revenge and hatred.

Production is set for August and September with locations including India and Thailand. Though the Lens Entertainment is looking to appoint a distributor and aims for a theatrical release in India, with digital distribution in international territories.

“The challenge of depicting a serial murderess as a heroine is what intrigues me most about ‘Troilokya.’ ‘Is it possible to muster empathy for this child bride turned prostitute turned killer?...

Bruce Berman, a senior executive who was previously chairman and CEO of Los Angeles-based Village Roadshow Pictures, has come out of retirement to board the recently-founded film studio Through the Lens Entertainment.

The company, founded by producer Aditya Chand, is headquartered in Singapore with operations in the U.S. and Japan. It aims to combine the opportunities of the East and the power and experience of the studio systems in the West, “to offer a new studio ecosystem out of Asia, that is built for the digital age.”

Two film projects are already underway and a third with “Slumdog Millionaire” star Frieda Pinto is in development.

Berman is taking the title of president and co-chairman and will join the board of the company that was incorporated in 2021. Another Vrp alumnus, Robert Corbin is joining the company as its chief financial officer. Corbin was previously Vrp’s executive director of finance...

Exclusive: Julie Baldassi of Younger Daughter Films and Brian Robertson of Low End announce Britt Lower (Severance), Tom Mercier (We Are Who We Are), Jean Yoon (Kim’s Convenience) and Sook-Yin Lee (Shortbus) will star in the drama/thriller/romance The Incident Report.

The film is executive-produced by Academy Award-winning Charlie Kaufman, and written/directed by Naomi Jaye’s (The Pin). Principal photography runs from August 2-29, 2022, in Hamilton and Toronto, Ontario.

Librarian Miriam Gordon (Lower) lives in a fog of grief while working amidst marginalized members of the public who populate her downtown public branch. When a burgeoning love-affair with Janko, a younger foreign cab driver (Mercier) coincides with her receiving a series of oddly threatening letters addressed to her, Miriam’s sheltered existence is cracked open.

The Incident Report is Jaye’s sophomore adaptation of the novel written by Martha Baillie. It is...

Denis Villeneuve will have two films in the festival as it emerged that Canadian Features world premiere Enemy starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a man and his doppelganger [pictured] has joined the previously announced Prisoners, also starring Gyllenhaal.

The Canadian Features selection includes Michael Dowse’s Goon follow-up The F Word, Xavier Dolan’s Tom At The Farm and Chloe Robichaud’s Sarah Prefers To Run as well as work from Jeff Barnaby, Bruce McDonald and Bruce Labruce. Also receiving its world premiere is All The Wrong Reasons featuring the final performance by the late Glee star Cory Monteith.

Festival organisers also unveiled Producers Lab Toronto participants and Telefilm Canada Pitch This! finallists, the shorts programme and participants in the tenth Tiff Talent Lab.

“The scope of this year’s feature films is as broad as Canada’s filmmaking community and demonstrates the deep versatility of our filmmakers,” said Tiff senior programmer Steve Gravestock. “From clever...

Denis Villeneuve will have two films in the festival as it emerged on Wednesday [7] that Canadian Features world premiere Enemy starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a man and his doppelganger [pictured] has joined the previously announced Prisoners, also starring Gyllenhaal.

The Canadian Features selection includes Michael Dowse’s Goon follow-up The F Word, Xavier Dolan’s Tom At The Farm and Chloe Robichaud’s Sarah Prefers To Run as well as work from Jeff Barnaby, Bruce McDonald and Bruce Labruce.

“The scope of this year’s feature films is as broad as Canada’s filmmaking community and demonstrates the deep versatility of our filmmakers,” said Tiff senior programmer Steve Gravestock. “From clever, biting satire to intimate social commentary, powerful dramas and even a truly magical comedy, the settings and themes vary, but the perspectives are always uniquely Canadian.”

The City Of Toronto and Canada Goose Award for Best Canadian Feature Film will be given to one of many outstanding...