The Midnight Library
Genre: Fantasy
Director: Michel Gondry
Writer: Meirad Tako
Based on the novel by Matt Haig
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Julie Walters, Daryl McCormack, Ben Whishaw, Jack Lowden, Meirad Tako
Plot: Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat playing chess with Mrs. Elm (Julie Walters) in the Hazeldene School library. ‘You could be anything you want to be, Nora,’ the kind librarian had said, her eyes twinkling. ‘Think of all that possibility’.
Nineteen years later, that possibility felt like a crushing weight. Twenty-seven hours before she decided to die, Nora Seed (Jessie Buckley) sat on her dilapidated sofa, waiting for something to happen. The first domino fell when a man named Ash (Daryl McCormack) rang her doorbell. He was a surgeon she knew from the music shop where she worked, a kind man who had once asked her for coffee. He hadn’t come for coffee. He’d come to tell her that her cat, Voltaire, was lying dead by the side of the road. As she stared at Voltaire’s still expression, an inescapable feeling brewed in the darkness. Envy.
The next day, her boss at String Theory, the musical equipment shop where she’d worked for nearly thirteen years, fired her. ‘I can’t pay you to put off customers with your face looking like a wet weekend,’ Neil told her. Wandering aimlessly through Bedford, the town became a conveyor belt of despair. She ran into Ravi (Meirad Tako), her brother’s best friend and their former bandmate in The Labyrinths. He blamed her for their failure. ‘We could be Coldplay now,’ he spat, before delivering the final blow: ‘I don’t think your problem was stage fright. Or wedding fright. I think your problem was life fright’.
The small pillars of her life crumbled one by one. Her only piano student quit. Her elderly neighbour, Mr. Banerjee, for whom she collected prescriptions, cheerfully informed her he no longer needed her help. She was superfluous to the universe.
That night, she finished a bottle of wine and left a final voicemail for her brother, Joe (Ben Whishaw). ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing you could have done’. She found a pen and paper.
I had all the chances to make something of my life, and I blew every one of them, she wrote.
I have nothing to give. I’m sorry. It was, she decided, a very good time to die.
At first, there was only mist, which slowly cleared to reveal a building with a grand-looking clock, its hands pointing to midnight. Her own watch was frozen. 00:00:00. She stepped inside and found herself not in a building, but a library. Aisles of shelves stretched into infinity, holding books of every shade of green. They had no titles on their spines.
‘Be careful,’ a voice said.
Nora turned to see her old school librarian, Mrs. Elm, looking precisely as she always did in Nora’s mind, right down to the turtle-green polo neck.
‘Am I dead?’ Nora asked.
‘Not exactly,’ Mrs. Elm said. ‘Between life and death there is a library. And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’
Mrs. Elm retrieved a single, heavy, grey book from a shelf. The title was embossed in small typeface:
The Book of Regrets. ‘Every regret you have ever had, since the day you were born, is recorded in here,’ Mrs. Elm explained.
Nora opened it and felt the weight of her life crash down upon her. The regrets swarmed, ranging from the minor to the substantial:
I regret not staying in The Labyrinths, because I let down my brother. I regret not going to Australia with Izzy. I regret not becoming a glaciologist. I regret not getting married. The regret of breaking up with Dan (Jack Lowden), the man she’d so nearly married, was particularly strong and bold. The power of all the regrets emanating from the book became an agony, a physical weight that made it hard to breathe.
‘Make it stop!’ she cried.
‘Close the book,’ Mrs. Elm instructed. Nora managed to slam it shut, gasping in relief.
‘Which regret stands out?’ Mrs. Elm asked. ‘Which life would you like to try on?’
Nora thought of Dan and his dream of owning a country pub, a dream that had almost become hers too. ‘I wish I hadn’t left Dan,’ she said. ‘Is there a life where we are still together?lin
‘Of course,’ said Mrs. Elm, handing her a dark green book. Nora opened it and read the first line:
She walked out of the pub into the cool night air….
The text swirled, and the library dissolved. She was standing outside a quaint pub called The Three Horseshoes in the Oxfordshire countryside. It was their dream, made reality. Inside, she found Dan. He looked older, more tired, and the beard was gone. Their conversation was stilted. He was stressed about money, complaining about the wine she’d chosen and the menu. The dream felt strained.
‘Was just turning the chiller units off,’ he said, his voice emptier than she remembered.
The truth unravelled quickly. Dan had been unfaithful. ‘Am I going to be beaten up for ever about one stupid drunken moment?’ he asked.
‘One stupid mistake?’ she echoed.
‘Okay, two’.
This life she had mourned, the one she had beaten herself up for not living, was a prison of its own. He drank heavily, belittled her, and seemed utterly ungrateful for the life she had felt so guilty for not allowing to happen. The disappointment was complete, a cold wave washing over her, and just as suddenly as she had arrived, she was back in the library.
'Well, that was terrible,’ she told Mrs. Elm.
Her next choice was driven by fame. What if she hadn’t quit The Labyrinths? She found herself backstage at a massive stadium in São Paulo, the roar of the crowd a physical force. In this life, she was a global icon with 11.3 million Instagram followers, a lip piercing, and a dramatic white streak in her hair. She had dated and dumped the movie star Ryan Bailey, a man who featured in her root-life fantasies. She felt a surge of power as she sang a Simon & Garfunkel cover to twenty thousand adoring fans.
This, surely, was the life. But in a hotel suite after the show, during a podcast interview, the dark side of this life was revealed. The interviewer, Marcelo, spoke of stalkers, court cases, rehab, and a messy break-up with Ryan Bailey. Then came the question that shattered the illusion.
‘Your brother was such a big part of your life, such a big part of the band…’ he said, his voice full of sympathy.
Was. Such dread in a small word.
‘You know,’ Marcelo said gently, ‘it’s only been two years since his death… his overdose…’
The grand hotel dissolved into nothing. The pain of this loss was more acute than any failure she had felt in her original life. Back in the library, she realized that success wasn't an inoculation against tragedy.
She needed something different. Not fame, not someone else’s dream, but purpose. She remembered wanting to be a glaciologist, a dream born from a National Geographic article and encouraged by Mrs. Elm. She woke on a small boat in the Arctic, the air so cold it burned. Here, she was a scientist researching the impact of climate change.
She met another "slider," a French scientist named Hugo Lefèvre. His gateway was a video store from his childhood in Lyon. ‘The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes,’ he explained. They were Schrödinger’s cats, suspended between life and death, able to observe every possibility.
Assigned as the polar bear lookout for a fieldwork team on a tiny, nameless island, Nora stood alone in the vast, white silence. It was here, as a massive white bear emerged from the fog and moved toward her with terrifying grace, that a profound realization hit her. As she frantically banged a ladle against a saucepan, screaming for the library to take her back, another, more powerful truth became astoundingly clear. She didn’t want to die. In the face of death, life seemed overwhelmingly attractive.
The bear slipped back into the water, and Nora was left with the shocking, electrifying knowledge that she wanted to live.
This realization led her to a quieter regret. Ash, the surgeon. The man who found her dead cat. What if she had said yes to that coffee?
She woke in a bed next to him. A small voice from the landing jolted her. ‘Mummy, I had a nightmare’.
In this life, they had a daughter. Molly. They lived in Cambridge, where Ash was a surgeon and Nora, on sabbatical from teaching philosophy at the university, was writing a book on Thoreau. It was a good life, an excess of good. She had a loving husband, a wonderful daughter, a meaningful career, and a healthy relationship with her brother, Joe. This was it. The life she would stay in.
But a day trip back to her hometown of Bedford revealed the subtle, tragic cost of this happiness. She saw her former piano student, Leo, a boy with real talent, being arrested for shoplifting, a knife in his pocket. Without her as his teacher, he’d fallen in with the wrong crowd. Her old neighbour, Mr. Banerjee, was no longer in his house with its beloved garden; he was in a care home, a place he’d been determined to avoid. And the real Mrs. Elm, the one from her root life, had died there three weeks ago.
She had joined this movie halfway through, stepping into a life she hadn’t earned. She was a fraud. As she hugged Molly in their garden, she felt the life slipping away. The perfection was the flaw. It wasn't truly hers.
‘NO!’ she screamed as she found herself back in the Midnight Library. But this time, it was different. The library was coming apart. Dust fell from a fissuring ceiling, books ignited on their shelves, and her watch began to tick forward from midnight.
‘This library isn’t falling down because it wants to kill you,’ Mrs. Elm yelled over the chaos. ‘It’s falling down because it is giving you a chance to return. You have decided you want to be alive. Now go on, live, while you still have the chance’.
The library was a construct of her own mind, a way to process the quantum wave function. Its destruction meant her root life was ending. She was dying. Mrs. Elm pointed her toward the one book that wasn't burning: a blank one. Her root life.
Nora scrambled through the debris, dodging falling chunks of ceiling, and grabbed the book. Taking the fountain pen Mrs. Elm had given her, she uncapped it and, with the whole universe collapsing around her, scribbled three simple words, the one truth she now welcomed with every fiery molecule of her being.
I AM ALIVE.
At one minute and twenty-seven seconds past midnight, Nora Seed marked her emergence back into life by vomiting all over her duvet. Choking, trembling, in pain, it was the worst life could feel, and yet it was life, and that was precisely what she wanted. She staggered to Mr. Banerjee’s door and collapsed on his doormat as he called for an ambulance.
Life begins on the other side of despair. In the hospital, she reconciled with a tearful Joe, who confessed he’d been struggling with alcohol after a bad break-up. Izzy texted to say she was moving back to the UK. The impossible, she supposed, happens via living.
A few days later, she visited Oak Leaf Residential Care Home. Mrs. Elm was frail, her hair white, but her eyes sparkled when Nora produced a chessboard.
‘I’m so pleased you came to see me,’ the old woman said.
‘Well, I have no one to play chess with either,’ Nora smiled.
Mrs. Elm made a move, a bishop sweeping into a strong position. ‘You’re going to win this,’ Nora observed.
A real smile spread across Mrs. Elm’s face. ‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends’.
And Nora smiled as she stared at all the pieces she still had left in play, thinking about her next move.
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