Mouse
by Hope Madden
Kelly O’Sullivan is batting a thousand.
Her 2019 feature debut as a screenwriter, Saint Frances, was a raw, sloppy, honest treasure. By 2024’s critical darling Ghostlight, she was co-directing her screenplays with Saint Francis director Alex Thompson. The duo pair up behind the camera once again to bring O’Sullivan’s latest script, the bumpy and mournful coming-of-age drama Mouse, to the screen.
Mouse follows the grief cycle of two people: a mother (Sophie Okonedo) who lost her daughter, and a cripplingly introverted teen Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), the daughter’s best friend.
The film masquerades as a coming-of-age story. It follows its protagonist’s bumpy path out of the innocence of childhood toward adulthood, learning painful but vital lessons along with her. But there’s never anything so linear or obvious about O’Sullivan’s work.
Her writing is so beautifully messy, resembling life far more honestly than any streamlined feature could. The film sits with the rage and wonder, joy and guilt, hope and shame that complicate young life—often in the same scene, sometimes in the same moment.
O’Sullivan and Thompson’s quietly powerful ensembles is more than up to the task. Kupferer delivers not a single false note as a girl who didn’t realize how lost she was in her best friend’s shadow until the shadow disappeared. Minnie’s awkwardness never feels put on, giving her heartbreak and outbursts painful authenticity.
Okonedo’s never turned in a weak performance, and her work here is especially tender and prickly, as it should be. She, in particular, seems to feel the bruises of O’Sullivan’s writing, addressing a side of grief—the abandoned, unwelcomed, awkward-to-be-around side—we rarely see realistically portrayed.
A gorgeous supporting turn from Tara Mallen emphasizes the film’s real world feel and its terribly human humor. Iman Vellani likewise bursts with wit and humanity.
As is always the case with O’Sullivan and Thompson’s films, Mouse delivers an unpredictable, lived-in mess of a world brimming with pain, laughter, and above all, resilience. It may be their best work yet.
