REVIEW

‘MOUSE’ Rises in the Shadow When Someone Great Is Gone

Name: Mouse review
Item: Mouse
Rating: 3.7
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · November 5, 2026

‘MOUSE’ Rises in the Shadow When Someone Great Is Gone

North Little Rock, Arkansas. 2002. Best friends Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) and Callie (Chloe Coleman) are just beginning the summer before their senior year of high school. Life’s infinite possibilities spool out in front of them, a tapestry of promise. Minnie, less popular but more academically accomplished, dreams of moving to the city and escaping the rural trap of small-minded townie culture, whereas Callie, beloved throughout the school and with a knack for theatrics, wants to hone her craft. Despite their close friendship, Callie’s popularity eclipses Minnie’s, the latter seen as the shy sidekick to her supercharged bestie. When Callie dies in a tragic car accident, Minnie is left reeling, trying to figure out how to move forward. A close friendship with Callie’s mom Helen (Sophie Okonedo) complicates the grieving process, as Minnie begins to step in for Helen’s lost daughter and the two try to navigate the tricky road of grief together.

Co-directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson follow up Ghostlight, their affecting 2024 feature about a cantankerous construction worker who joins a local theater troupe, with Mouse, a grounded coming-of-age drama cut from the same blue-collar cloth. As in Ghostlight, there’s an economy to how these people live and speak: no one has the luxury of grieving gracefully, and the film is gritty and down-to-earth about the mess of it all.

The real engine of the film is quiet, unspoken class-warfare. Minnie is not-so-secretly ashamed of her single mom Barbara (Tara Mallen), who’s scraping by in a house Minnie would rather no one see. Her hard-working mom is definitely a little slobbish, far from the idea of polished, but she’s hardworking and desperate to know just a little bit about her daughter’s life. Helen is her opposite in every meaningful way: refined, married, British, unemployed by choice, and floating around a McMansion. Her life, like Callie’s before her, looks ideal from the outside looking in.

Katherine Mallen Kupferer and Chloe Coleman in Mouse (2026)

A surrogate-daughter arrangement that begins as closeness curdles into something too close for comfort, and O’Sullivan’s script lets the audience stew in the building discomfort of two generations trying (and sometimes failing) to contend with their grief. Meanwhile, a foster baby left in Barbara’s care (dropped off one day and never picked up) casts a ghost light on everything Minnie is too ashamed to see: her mom has a bottomless capacity for love, and the daughter she’d gladly give it to keeps treating her like a punching bag.

The performances are uniformly strong. Kupferer, also a standout in Ghostlight, plays Minnie downtrodden and reserved; all normie energy and hunched shoulders, a girl trying to awkwardly cram herself into the shape of her dead best friend’s charisma. Okonedo finds the balance between tenderness and hollowness in Helen, a woman who doesn’t mean to steal anyone’s daughter but can’t resist the warmth of a kid at her kitchen table, and who eventually has the self-awareness to seek out a parents’ grief group instead.

Mallen proves a sleeper scene-stealer Barbara is no showy role, but she’s so real that when the film finally gives her room, she becomes the brash counterweight to Helen’s elegance. Iman Vellani brings welcome levity as Kat, the crush who lost her own mother a year earlier and with whom Minnie shares a first kiss, though the film treats Minnie’s budding sexuality as just one more thing she’s figuring out rather than a Big Defining Moment.

The climax, a school talent show dedicated to Callie, is less about Minnie being good (she is not much of a singer) than about her finally being seen. And having the courage to show herself, warts and all. David Hyde Pierce lends a warm, wry presence as Mr. Murdaugh, the theater teacher who keeps nudging her out of her shell, and his encouragement gives the finale some sense of stakes, even if it doesn’t quite end with a bang. Like much of Mouse, it’s mostly cringe and partly catharsis, which feels right for a story about a wallflower finally stepping into the light.

Cinematographers Luke Dyra and Nate Hurtsellers have a gift for that kind of light, too: one image of sun streaming through a window, catching the dust in a room full of eager faces, communicates the entire thesis of this film about small-town hope. Where Mouse falls short of its predecessor is impact. It’s honest, grounded, and well made, but at two hours it ambles and it never quite lands the emotional wallop Ghostlight delivers.

CONCLUSION: Grounded and strongly acted, ‘Mouse’ is a subtle, affecting coming-of-age drama about grief, class, and the friends we try to become once the people we loved are gone. It never hits with the freight-train force of ‘Ghostlight,’ but Katherine Mallen Kupferer and Sophie Okonedo make this grief-drama ache with earnestness.