‘Mouse’ review: A soaring song of grief and friendship

Katherine Mallen Kupferer is a star in the making in Mouse, a tale about a teen grappling with the loss of her best friend.

Mouse opens with the last day of school in 2002, when the summer ahead seems like it might go on forever. But for juniors Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) and Callie (Chloe Coleman), “forever” finds a brutal boundary.

Callie, the star of most productions at the girls’ high school theatre department, dreams of attending Juilliard and having a big life with Minnie by her side. Minnie, shyer and blatantly unpopular except in the eyes of her best friend, is less convinced she’s destined for greatness, or even for getting out of their small Arkansas town. Sure enough, their paths are about to diverge from one another, just not in the way they expected.

On the first day of summer break, Callie tragically dies in a car accident. Minnie is left to navigate a vicious cycle of high school mean girls who claim to have known Callie as well as Minnie did. Minnie’s relationship with her overworked, underpaid mother (Tara Mallen, playing her real-life daughter’s mother onscreen) is increasingly strained. Callie’s own mother, Helen (Sophie Okonedo), awkwardly navigates the identity crisis of being a parent whose sole child is gone. Each left to pick up the pieces of life without the sun their worlds orbited around, Minnie and Helen form an unlikely friendship.

Mouse grounds its grief in realism.

Photo Credit: Nate Hurtsellers and Luke Dyra

Mouse is so vividly realized, so grounded in its setting that one can imagine directors Kelly O’Sullivan (also Mouse‘s writer) and Alex Thompson simply picked up a camera and started filming in a small Bible Belt town. The teenagers, from Minnie to video store employee Kat (Iman Vellani) to Callie’s many mourners, speak like real teenagers, not precocious, unrealistic ones. Each line reading has the naturalness of spontaneous conversation. They’re given the room to be just okay at tap dancing or singing or figuring out how to process grief.

An actor’s job, to be sure, involves depicting someone you’re not. But it’s no small feat to play such deeply vulnerable characters, whose earnestness pours out in off-key singing and untrained dancing. The adults are perfectly cast, including the underutilized but always-welcome David Hyde Pierce as the girls’ drama teacher. Mallen brings unexpected poignance to her role as Minnie’s mother, villainized by her daughter until her own humanity has a chance to shine through.

Chemistry beyond romance.

Mouse centers far more on Minnie’s grasp on grief than it does Helen’s. Minnie serves as Helen’s way to stay involved in rites of passage that her daughter will never experience. “Chemistry” is a term so often used for romantic pairings that it’s often forgotten as a necessary thing to bring platonic relationships to life, too. Mallen Kupferer has a naturalistic chemistry with both Coleman and Okonedo. She’s also a star in the making. We get to know Helen less through her relationship with Callie and more through her life without her daughter. It’s a small drawback in an otherwise incredibly well-rounded film. For as important as Callie is to the narrative, Helen’s grief captures a mother-daughter relationship we didn’t get to know as deeply as Callie and Minnie’s friendship.

The bottom line.

Mouse is so gentle a film, it sneaks up on you. We’ve barely gotten to know Callie and Minnie for twenty minutes of runtime before Callie dies. Mallen Kupferer and Coleman are so convincing as a pair of best friends that Coleman’s absence for the rest of the film is genuinely devastating. At two hours, a meditation on grief might overstay its welcome or be saccharine. But Mouse, so warm and sad and awkward and true to life, feels like eavesdropping on reality. You could stay forever in Mouse‘s quietness, and want the song to keep going.

Mouse is now playing in select theaters. Watch the trailer below.

Images courtesy of Nate Hurtsellers and Luke Dyra.

Claire Di Maio

Claire was once asked in elementary school why her go-to question was always, “Watch anything good lately?” It’s still her go-to question, because she loves hearing what other people are passionate about. She often sacrifices sleep in the hopes that she will one day clear her to-watch and to-read lists (a futile effort so far).