The world of Matt Haig’s much-loved best-seller, The Midnight Library, is officially coming to Hollywood – and it’s being graced by no less than Florence Pugh as its Nora Seed. The Academy Award winner, who also produced the adaptation, is to star in it, indicating a strong commitment of the actor to make this philosophical, emotional tale come to life on the big screen. If you’ve been reading late into the night on Haig’s novel, wondering how it would feel to see the multiverse of regret and possibility come to life, then Pugh’s involvement is a subtle form of reassurance. This story calls for a rare kind of holding multiple paradoxes in one frame and, she has, she does.
The movie, which Garth Davis will direct, is based on Nora Seed, a woman at the end of her rope who finds her in a magical library between life and death. In every book in this library she can undo one of her regrets and take on another path for herself, one where she made a different choice for herself. It is one of those quiet tragedies of what ifs and what hasn’t been and a meditation on belonging, self-forgiveness, what if.It is a what if, a what hasn’t been, a meditation on belonging, a meditation on self-forgiveness, what if. It’s one of those premises that can fall into sentimentalism, but in Haig’s hands – and hopefully in Davis and Pugh’s hands – it’s more taut and truthful. The project has been discussed with complete sincerity by Davis, who is the previous director of Lion and Mary Magdalene. When he spoke about the film, he called Pugh’s talent and warmth “magical” and said, “Together with Matt’s iconic novel we’ll do something special.” He then continued to refer to it as “a celebration of life in all its possibilities and complexity.”
It matters, this sense of celebration, because The Midnight Library has really struck a chord with millions of readers because it doesn’t pretend that life is easy. It embraces the sadness of the disappointed, the solitude of the stuck, the dubious comforter of the alternate me. It also nudges back a little, asking us if we would have been happier if we had taken other paths. It’s a big enough internal and even philosophical journey to translate to a visual medium without a doubt and Pugh, as the producer and lead, seems to understand the challenge. In her last trilogy of work (Little Women, Dune, Oppenheimer), she has always been willing to ground more complicated, literary stuff in the emotional truth of it.
Executive producer Matt Haig, who also wrote the book, was “very excited” to be working on the movie. “It’s so wonderful to see Nora’s story in such good hands, and all of the possibilities that Nora has in her book will be brought to life in such a perfect way,” Haig said about the team that will bring his book to the big screen. “I can’t wait to see my book come alive for the big screen.” Such a trust of the author is not granted so easily, particularly from a novel which has become a cultural totem for readers who are facing their own crossroads. The Midnight Library has always been grounded in lived experience, and Haig, who has been candid about his own mental health issues, has never been afraid to spell that out.
There’s no more news on casting as of yet and the movie is set to go into pre-production later this fall. What is yet to be determined is how this adaptation will deal with the library’s scattered and disjointed character, with each book, each new life, each emotional detour. There might be some readers out there who are curious if the film’s going to eliminate the reflective pauses of the novel while instead taking on the more common trope of redemption. Others might just be happy the project is in the hands of people who appear to be genuinely interested in the project’s interior world. In the past years, there have been growing doubts on how literary works are adapted to the public, and there is a reason to those doubts. However, there is a certain presence to Pugh that changes the subject. She is not a character player, she’s a character inhabitor, and Nora Seed is a character in need of inhabiting.
Here, Haig is beginning to plan ahead. He is currently working on a new book called The Midnight Train, which is set in the same fictional world as The Midnight Library. It is said to be a magical time-travel love story of Wilbur, who wants to relive moments he wanted to see in his past with Maggie, the love of his life. This news is a delight to fans of The Midnight Library, and for some, it’s a source of unease. What will the new book be? Will it be a wonderful world or will it fall into clichés of feeling? Will it be a “friend” or a “copy”? That’s the risk of any shared universe, particularly one based on such close, one-of-a-kind sorrow and optimism. Which is the risk this film adaptation also takes.
