Those familiar with Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s work (Saint Frances, Ghostlight) will recognise the warmth that immediately permeates their latest feature, Mouse. Indeed, to experience their filmmaking is to flit between all sorts of wonderful things. This is a light and small story that proceeds with ease and comfort, but it’s certainly not without its emotional heft. The narrative is about coming of age, while mercifully eliding the twee and the contrived. It is at once truthful yet somehow inscrutable, just as it is perceptively humorous but guided by a North Star of empathy.
In 2002 Arkansas, two teenage girls, Callie (Chloe Coleman) and Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), are finishing up their penultimate year of high school. The two are the best of friends, even bearing a striking resemblance – yet they are also worlds apart. Callie is a natural performer, outgoing, living in a beautiful home with her well-off parents, and she sees for herself a life on the stage. Minnie is a wallflower with an aptitude for maths, and she spends most of her time working a part-time job. Raised by a single mother in a cramped and messy house, her aspirations are heavily contained. In the early stages of what would be an exciting summer, tragedy strikes and Callie is killed in a car accident. Minnie is left rudderless and glumly facing her final year of high school alone.
The film is awash in the kind of lingering heartbreak that disarms – at one agonising juncture, Callie’s mother Helen (Sophie Okonedo) plays a tape of her conversation with a medium to a bewildered audience of Callie’s teenage friends. The medium, feigning a direct line to Callie, rattles off a list of not-quite-right names to a credulous grieving mother who buys every word that he says. Then, a hello to ‘Minnie Mouse’. Helen looks desperately at Minnie for confirmation – was this what Callie called Minnie? Minnie cannot tell this bereaved woman no, nor can she say that this man is probably a grifter, and that her daughter is most likely not watching down on them and trying to send a message. So she nods; we see the relief crossing Helen’s face, and the film receives its name.
So much of Mouse works because of Okonedo, who emotes so beautifully yet wordlessly, and we’re reminded of her turn in Annie Baker’s terrific Janet Planet, where she was sublime as Mum’s quirky pal to a shy young girl. Here, she’s yet again an interloper (at least, depending on who you ask) in an intricate mother-daughter relationship, where she develops a fascinating bond with Mallen Kupferer’s sweetly captivating Minnie. Each gets something out of this loosely transactional relationship: Minnie, a chance to see the life she could’ve had with an effortlessly cool, cultured mother, and Helen, an outlet for unspent maternal love.
As their connection deepens, Minnie gets to pull her self-esteem up a couple of notches, giving in to some of the youthful festivities of the typical high schooler and embracing a budding romance with a girl from the video store. As for Helen, a professional chamber musician turned accompanist for her theatre kid daughter, the loss of her child threatens to collapse her daily existence. But she can also redirect some of her energy towards someone else – she can resume driving around, cooking dinners, and going to PTA meetings.
Mouse gives us two hours to commune with grief, and most of all its messy, omni-directional nature. The grief of the parent is evidently at the helm, but so is grief’s burden on the best friend (and even the cruel high school frenemy), as well as their collective intermixing. O’Sullivan and Thompson are ever so deeply attuned to verisimilitude – their creation is something beguiling and compulsively watchable, a film grandly executing its humble ambitions.
Mouse screened at the London Film Festival and will be released in UK cinemas on 29 January 2027.
