A quiet coming-of-age drama, Mouse follows Minnie as she rebuilds identity and relationships after losing her closest friend; directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson and premiered at Berlinale
Mouse is a quietly devastating portrait of adolescence unraveled by loss. Directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, the film follows Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) after the sudden death of her best friend Callie (Chloe Coleman). Rather than reaching for melodrama, the filmmakers trace the slow, uneven terrain of grief—its small confusions, awkward consolations and tiny, stubborn acts of care.
The opening scenes bask in sunlit suburbia, rendered with affectionate period detail, before the story tightens into the domestic and the interior. The film’s power lies in its accumulation of moments: a held glance, a lingering close-up of a hand, an offhand remark that lands like a revelation. Sound and image privilege ambient texture over punchy punctuation, which lets the emotional undercurrent build without artificial peaks.
Performances anchor everything. Kupferer gives Minnie a measured, tactile presence—shifts in posture and the cadence of her silences reveal more than any line of dialogue. Coleman’s Callie haunts the film both in memory and in the spaces she left behind; her earlier buoyancy sharpens the sense of loss later on. Supporting turns add grain and warmth: Sophie Okonedo is a composed, grieving mother whose evolving closeness with Minnie becomes the film’s emotional fulcrum, while Tara Mullen’s distracted, affectionate parent and Iman Vellani’s quietly intimate potential love interest round out a cast attuned to understatement.
Directorial choices reinforce that restraint. Scenes trade sweeping statements for ordinary rituals—a shared meal, a clumsy attempt at comfort, a neighborhood memorial—so that grief reads as process rather than spectacle. The camera lingers on domestic details and faces, allowing feeling to emerge through behavior instead of exposition. This observational approach can feel deliberate to the point of testing patience, but it’s also what makes the film feel lived-in: mourning, here, resists quick fixes.
A recurring thread is the uneasy formation of surrogate family. Minnie’s tentative movement toward Helen’s ordered household—its routines, its care—asks uncomfortable questions about dependence, autonomy and the emotional work of substitution. The film refuses to moralize; it occupies the gray area where solace can also threaten existing bonds, and where gestures meant to help sometimes misstep. Boundaries are not resolved in a single scene but are reasserted through a series of ordinary interactions that feel true to life.
Romance in Mouse is not a cure but a continuity. The budding relationship between Minnie and Kat unfolds slowly and without fanfare, woven into grief rather than displacing it. Their intimacy is reciprocal and tentative, small acts of attention that nudge Minnie’s identity into new shapes while leaving room for the past. By treating young queer love as a matter-of-fact tenderness rather than a narrative salve, the film honors both desire and mourning.
Stylistically, Mouse favors observation over statement. Its pacing is patient, its editing restrained; the result is a tone that privileges endurance, repair and the mechanics of daily grief. Early-2000s music and suburban textures add tactile specificity without drifting into indulgent nostalgia. Sound design and close, lingering images invite viewers to feel with the characters rather than be told how to feel.
Mouse doesn’t tidy up sorrow or promise neat redemption. Instead it offers a compassionate, textured study of what remains when a life is interrupted: the awkward consolations, the small reconciliations, and the slow, imperfect ways people relearn how to belong to one another.