Mouse

Mouse begins in the warm, suspended summer of 2002, when adulthood still appears to be a distant country and the future can be mapped out during a sleepover. In suburban North Little Rock, Arkansas, Minnie, played with remarkable emotional precision by Katherine Mallen Kupferer, is preparing for her final year of high school alongside her lifelong best friend Callie, embodied with radiant confidence by Chloe Coleman. The girls genuinely adore one another, but their friendship has developed around a quiet imbalance: Callie is the born performer who attracts attention without asking for it, while Minnie has become accustomed to standing just outside the spotlight. Callie can imagine Juilliard, Broadway, awards and a gloriously dramatic career; Minnie struggles to picture a life that might properly belong to her. Written by Kelly O’Sullivan and co-directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, the film understands that adolescent friendships can be both loving and unequal without becoming toxic. Its early scenes carry the tactile specificity of a half-remembered youth (the songs playing through car speakers, the physical ritual of visiting a video store, the theatrical intensity of teenage conversations) and establish a world before social media turned every private emotion into a potential public performance. The period setting is not decorative nostalgia. It creates a slower emotional environment in which silence, absence and the inability to contact someone immediately retain a particular weight.

That sunlit atmosphere is shattered when Callie dies in a car accident, an event revealed early enough to become the foundation of the story rather than its climactic surprise. Mouse is less interested in the mechanics of tragedy than in the uncomfortable social order that emerges after it. Minnie has lost the person around whom she constructed much of her identity, yet she is repeatedly pushed to the margins by classmates who are more visible, more articulate and quicker to claim their place in Callie’s story. Cara, played by Audrey Grace Marshall, effectively turns remembrance into an organised school production, announcing her grief with the confidence of someone running for office; Minnie privately recognises the resulting spectacle as an “Olympics of grief.” The observation is sharp because many viewers will recognise the phenomenon: after a death, emotional legitimacy can seem to belong to whoever speaks first or cries most publicly. David Hyde Pierce, appearing as drama teacher Mr. Murdaugh, brings dry humour and gentle authority to this turmoil. His character refuses to rank anyone’s sorrow, reminding the students that apparently contradictory expressions of loss can all be real. The film extends the same generosity to Cara. Her behaviour can be vain, territorial and deeply hurtful, but she is not reduced to a conventional mean girl, just as Minnie’s greater proximity to Callie does not make every choice Minnie makes noble.

The film’s most compelling relationship develops between Minnie and Callie’s mother, Helen, played with extraordinary control by Sophie Okonedo. Helen is an elegant British former concert pianist whose cultivated home once offered Minnie an escape from the disorder and financial strain of her own household. After Callie’s death, Minnie and Helen instinctively reach for one another because each carries memories that the other needs. Their evenings together, their shared meals and Helen’s efforts to prepare Minnie for the school memorial performance initially resemble mutual rescue, but Mouse is too perceptive to pretend that grief can produce a substitute daughter without consequences. Minnie wants to remain close to Callie by occupying the space she left behind, while Helen risks transforming Minnie into a continuation of the child she cannot recover. Their intimacy therefore becomes tender, possessive and occasionally damaging at the same time. Sophie Okonedo allows composure to function as a fragile shell rather than an indication of emotional superiority; a look held a second too long can reveal both gratitude and alarm. Katherine Mallen Kupferer, meanwhile, communicates Minnie’s confusion through hesitations and flashes of resentment, showing a teenager who cannot always distinguish love from dependence. The film’s central insight is that shared pain does not automatically create a healthy relationship—it merely creates an opening, and what people place inside that opening may be comforting, selfish or both.

Equally important is Minnie’s relationship with her own mother, Barbara, portrayed by Tara Mallen with unpolished warmth and bruising credibility. Barbara works at a veterinary clinic, fills the family’s modest home with unwanted animals and extends her maternal care to an adopted baby, creating precisely the kind of noisy, improvised domestic life that embarrasses her daughter. The visual contrast between Barbara’s reheated dinners and Helen’s sophisticated meals is somewhat obvious, but the performances complicate what might otherwise become a simplistic opposition between two mothers. Minnie mistakes refinement for emotional security and chaos for neglect, even though Barbara’s home is chaotic largely because she cannot stop offering refuge to vulnerable creatures. One of the film’s most moving passages takes place when Barbara asks Minnie to help euthanise an elderly dog. The scene avoids grand speeches, using the practical tenderness of veterinary care to bring mother and daughter into contact with the reality they have been avoiding: loving something does not prevent its death, and letting go does not invalidate that love. When Barbara and Helen finally confront one another, Mouse refuses to declare either woman the rightful mother figure. Both are grieving a daughter in different ways—one because her child has died, the other because her living child seems to be slipping beyond her reach.

A quieter form of possibility arrives through Kat, a video-store clerk played with easy charisma by Iman Vellani. Kat has experienced a major loss of her own and recognises Minnie’s sadness without demanding that she perform it. Their attraction develops through awkward pauses, tentative compliments and the slightly incredulous laughter of teenagers discovering that their feelings may be reciprocated. What is especially refreshing is the absence of a conventional crisis surrounding Minnie’s queer awakening. Her sexuality is not treated as another disaster to be solved, nor is Kat turned into a magical romantic cure. Their connection simply gives Minnie a relationship that exists independently of Callie, allowing her to encounter herself outside the identity of bereaved best friend. Iman Vellani brings lightness without trivialising the material, and her presence illustrates the film’s belief that moving forward does not require leaving the dead behind. New affection can coexist with old sorrow. That idea also appears in the treatment of Brad, sensitively played by Beck Nolan, whose easygoing surface conceals the confusion of a boyfriend denied the cultural permission to articulate grief as openly as the girls around him. Even Callie’s father, portrayed by Christopher R. Ellis, remains part of a wider emotional landscape in which every survivor has lost a different version of the same person.

Formally, Mouse works best when it trusts gestures, objects and uncomfortable pauses more than dialogue. The Arkansas summer is photographed with a gentle intimacy that makes the film feel remembered rather than reconstructed, while carefully chosen early-2000s details ground the setting without turning it into an exhibition of millennial memorabilia. A recurring flower, an animal’s final breath and the hesitant notes of a piano acquire meaning gradually, without calling attention to themselves as symbols. The school variety show could easily have become the stage for a triumphant revelation in which Minnie discovers a hidden talent and wins the admiration of her peers. Instead, her performance is affecting precisely because she is not suddenly transformed into Callie. She is awkward, exposed and potentially miscast, yet she completes the number because the act of appearing as herself matters more than performing beautifully. Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson understand that catharsis can come from failing honestly rather than succeeding conventionally. Their tonal control is impressive throughout: scenes of devastating sadness are followed by flashes of deadpan comedy, not to neutralise grief but to reflect how ordinary life continues intruding upon it.

At two hours, the film occasionally lingers beyond the point of maximum impact, and its final movement is more eager to articulate reconciliation than the subtler earlier sections. A few conflicts arrive or resolve with conspicuous neatness, while some late dialogue translates feelings that the actors have already conveyed more eloquently through behaviour. Yet these weaknesses do not erase the cumulative power of a drama built around emotional contradictions rather than easy villains. Katherine Mallen Kupferer delivers a beautifully restrained leading performance, while Sophie Okonedo gives Helen the volatility, dignity and selfishness of a person whose grief cannot be made socially convenient; Tara Mallen, arguably the ensemble’s secret weapon, ensures that Barbara’s apparent messiness gradually reveals itself as another form of grace. Mouse ultimately proposes that coming of age is not a clean movement from dependence to independence, and that maturity does not belong exclusively to the young. Minnie, Helen and Barbara all have to revise the stories they tell about themselves. Humane, perceptive and quietly piercing, the film may stumble when it explains its own wisdom, but its finest moments understand that grief is not overcome—it is absorbed into the person one is still becoming.

Mouse
Directed by Kelly O’Sullivan, Alex Thompson
Written by Kelly O’Sullivan
Produced by Chelsea Krant, Pierce Cravens, Alex Thompson, Abigail Rose Solomon, Bonnie Comley, Stewart F. Lane, Steven A. Jones, Ian Keiser, Alex Wilson
Starring: Sophie Okonedo, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Chloe Coleman, Tara Mallen, Iman Vellani, David Hyde Pierce
Cinematography: Nate Hurtsellers, Luke Dyra
Edited by Mike S. Smith
Music by Hamilton Leithauser
Production companies: Little Engine, Metropolitan Entertainment, Rosalind Productions, Runaway Train, Truant Pictures
Distributed by: 
Release dates: NC
Running time: 120 minutes

Seen on 6 September 2026 at the Deauville International Center