MOUSE Review

There is a particular kind of grief that nobody warns you about, which is losing the person who made you feel like you belonged somewhere, and then having to figure out where you belong without them. Mouse understands this with such quiet, unshowy precision that it snuck up on me and left me a little wrecked in the best possible way.

Minnie is a curly-haired, acne-scarred teenager in North Little Rock, Arkansas, in 2002, practically invisible to everyone at school except Callie, the most popular girl in their class, who had always made sure Minnie was included, since before any of that mattered. Then Callie dies in a car crash, and the film asks the question that most movies skip: what happens to the person who loved her most quietly? Not the one who gets to stand up at the memorial and cry on cue. The one who does not know where to put her hands.

Katherine Mallen Kupferer is a genuine discovery as Minnie, all awkward charm and unguarded hurt, and she is matched beat for beat by Sophie Okonedo as Helen, Callie's shell-shocked mother, in a performance of such controlled, quiet devastation that it belongs in every awards conversation this year. Helen is elegant and gutted, a once-radiant woman now running on grief and piano music and very good manners. When she starts treating Minnie like the daughter she has lost, with home-cooked meals and private singing lessons, it is the most tender thing in the film and also, quietly, the most complicated.

Tara Mallen as Minnie's own mother Barbara is the secret weapon. Brash, oblivious, overstuffed with rescue animals and one adopted toddler, she is exactly the kind of mother a teenager is mortified by and exactly the kind she will spend adulthood missing. The film does not make her the villain and does not make Helen the saint. These two competing mothers feel real in a way that is rare and lovely.

Alex Thompson and Kelly O'Sullivan, the duo behind Saint Frances and Ghostlight, have a gift for finding enormous feeling in small spaces. David Hyde Pierce as the exasperated theatre teacher has two scenes that sneak up on you. The whole ensemble fumbles through loss the way real people do, awkwardly, wrongly, sincerely. And the film refuses the cliché you are bracing for. Helen does not unlock some hidden talent in Minnie that explodes at the big show. Life is smaller and truer than that.

The film is dedicated to O'Sullivan's late mother, and you can feel it in every frame.

🍿 SCORE = 85 / 100