has taken the unpromising story of a soft-spoken young librarian and turned it into a small wonder of a film, eloquent and captivating.) 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.
This plot thread doesn’t play out as a detective story, even though Miriam’s boss and a police officer also read the letters, so we know they exist. Jaye treats it as a psychological mystery, part of the key to Miriam. Her father is the touchstone. We don’t learn until nearly halfway into the film that he has died, although we have seen him in Miriam’s memory. He sits in the garage surrounded by books piled to the ceiling, the image sending an unspoken signal that something is off.