Review: 'Mouse' gently and powerfully explores the bonds between friends, and mother and daughter — and how hard they are to replace
The bonds of teen friendship and a mother-daughter relationship, and the pain when those bonds are broken, are at the heart of “Mouse,” a gut-wrenching and beautifully precise drama at the intersection of growing up and motherly pain.
Minnie Dunn (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) and Callie Bell (Chloe Coleman) are best friends, finishing their junior year of high school in their Arkansas town and preparing for next year, when they will rule the roost as the class of 2003. At least it’s assumed Callie will — she’s the shining star, the drama club ingenue and lead anchor on the school’s morning newscast, while Minnie is in her shadow, the script girl and camera operator.
On the first day of summer vacation, Minnie is returning home from her job at a children’s arcade when she gets the horrible news — spoiler alert — that Callie has died in a car crash. Even in mourning her best friend, Minnie gets overshadowed by the more demonstrative popular girls who claim Callie was their bestie.
The rest of the movie happens after summer vacation, when Minnie heads back to a senior year where she doesn’t know who she is without Callie as her North Star. The popular girls hijack the drama club’s annual senior cabaret, over the qualms of the drama teacher (David Hyde Pierce), and declare the show’s theme will rotate around Callie’s memory.
Minnie, struggling to handle her grief, starts working with Callie’s pianist mom, Helen (Sophie Okonedo), on vocal training to perform a song Callie wanted to do for the cabaret — setting up an unhealthy attachment for both Minnie and Helen, one that Minnie’s mom, Barbara (played by Mallen Kupferer’s real mom, Tara Mallen) can’t help but notice. There’s also a subplot about Minnie striking up a friendship, and maybe something more, with the girl at the video store (Iman Vellani, from “Ms. Marvel”).
Directors and life partners Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson wowed audiences in 2024 with “Ghostlight,” another deeply felt drama about parent-child relationships that used theater as a storytelling device. (Both films also starred Mallen and her daughter.) Here, in the authentic details and emotional depth of O’Sullivan’s script, the characters must navigate their grief, something for which there’s no reliable road map, and deal with how they must handle how grief changes relationships with the people left behind. The ensemble cast is spectacular, with solid work by Hyde Pierce and Vellani, and outstanding central performances by Okonedo as the mother unable to use the energy that she used to channel into her daughter, and particularly young Mallen Kupferer, who encapsulates the overwhelming pain of teen existence in ways few young actors have.
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‘Mouse’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, November 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language, some sexual references and teen drinking. Running time: 120 minutes.