Mouse (2026) Movie Review: A Profoundly Human Portrait of Grief, Growth, and the Friendships That Define Us

Mouse is a 2026 coming-of-age drama co-directed by Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson, written by O'Sullivan, and produced by Little Engine, Metropolitan Entertainment, Rosalind Productions, and Runaway Train. The film stars Sophie Okonedo and Katherine Mallen Kupferer in the central roles, with Chloe Coleman, Tara Mallen, Iman Vellani, David Hyde Pierce, Beck Nolan, Audrey Grace Marshall (Echo Valley), and Christopher R. Ellis completing the ensemble. Set in North Little Rock, Arkansas in the summer of 2002, the story follows seventeen-year-old Minnie, a quietly reserved teenager whose entire world is organized around her best friend Callie. When a sudden tragedy removes Callie from her life, Minnie must navigate grief, identity, and the unexpected relationships that emerge in loss's wake. The film premiered in the Panorama section of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival on February 13, 2026.

O'Sullivan and Thompson have built one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary American independent cinema across three features. Saint Frances announced a filmmaking voice of rare empathy and wit. Ghostlight deepened their reach into the emotional lives of ordinary people. Mouse, their most ambitious and arguably finest film to date, draws directly from O'Sullivan's own teenage years in Arkansas, and that autobiographical intimacy radiates through every frame. This is a film about the specific texture of being young, overlooked, and suddenly untethered, told with the kind of compassionate intelligence that transforms small, personal stories into something universally felt.

Story and Screenplay: Loss Without Melodrama, Growth Without Easy Resolution

O'Sullivan's screenplay wastes no time establishing its emotional universe. The opening scenes of Mouse hum with the particular aliveness of that last summer before senior year, Michelle Branch on the stereo, toilet paper in the treetops after a teenage prank, two girls driving through suburban Arkansas with the windows down. The friendship between Minnie and Callie is sketched with disarming speed and precision: one girl occupies the center of every room she enters; the other orbits her with genuine affection and an unexamined longing for the confidence she lacks. The imbalance is visible, but O'Sullivan never frames it as exploitation. These two actually love each other, which is precisely what makes what follows so devastating.

The script's most audacious structural choice is how early it delivers its central blow. Callie's death in a car accident arrives before the audience has fully settled in, and the film deliberately denies the conventional buildup to tragedy. This is not a story about watching someone die. It is a story about continuing to live, and everything that means for a seventeen-year-old who defined herself entirely through her relationship to someone who is no longer there. The screenplay earns genuine admiration for its refusal to compress grief into tidy dramatic arcs. Minnie's mourning is not a journey with clearly marked stages. It is a season of confusion, misplaced attachment, small cruelties, unexpected laughter, and the gradual, nonlinear process of building an identity from scratch. O'Sullivan allows all of this to coexist without forcing resolution on any of it.

The film's only tangible structural weakness is a slight looseness in its middle section. At 120 minutes, Mouse occasionally lingers on emotional beats a few degrees longer than necessary, and a sharper edit might have tightened the impact of some sequences without sacrificing the film's deliberate, immersive atmosphere. A few moments in the final act tip toward a neatness that the rest of the film consciously avoids. These are minor reservations against a screenplay of remarkable honesty and specificity, one that trusts its characters to be contradictory and its audience to sit with ambiguity rather than reach for comfort.

Acting and Characters: A Career-Defining Performance at the Center of an Extraordinary Ensemble

Katherine Mallen Kupferer carries Mouse with a restraint and precision that constitutes one of the year's most quietly extraordinary performances. Minnie is not an easy character to inhabit. Her defining characteristic for much of the film is her habit of existing at the periphery, of being present without taking up space, and Kupferer communicates this not through passivity but through a constant, barely perceptible readjustment, a perpetual recalibration of how much of herself to show. When grief strips away the protective structure of her friendship with Callie, Kupferer makes the exposure visible in the smallest possible ways. There are no grand breakdowns. There is just a person becoming gradually more legible, more present, more herself, and watching that process unfold is genuinely moving.

Sophie Okonedo's Helen is the film's other gravitational center, and Okonedo delivers what is immediately recognizable as a performance of exceptional depth. Helen is a woman balanced between composed sophistication and a grief that keeps finding the cracks in her carefully maintained surfaces. Her turn to a psychic in one of the film's quieter scenes speaks volumes about what she cannot say aloud, and Okonedo plays the character's vulnerability with a dignity that never tips into self-pity. The friendship that develops between Helen and Minnie, two people processing the same loss from entirely different positions, is the film's emotional spine, and the interplay between Okonedo and Kupferer is consistently transfixing, full of the kind of charged, unspoken communication that marks two actors working in genuine synchrony. Tara Mallen's Barbara, Minnie's overextended, occasionally oblivious, and fiercely loving mother, is the film's secret weapon, bringing warmth and humor and a piercing authenticity to a character who could easily have functioned merely as a contrast to Helen's composed elegance.

The supporting ensemble is uniformly excellent. Iman Vellani's Kat, a video store clerk whose attraction to Minnie introduces a quiet queer romance into the story, brings a natural, unforced energy that makes every scene she occupies feel lighter without making it feel less serious. The film's handling of Minnie's emerging sexuality is one of its most distinctive achievements, integrating her first romantic connection into the fabric of her grief and growth without announcement or anxiety, treating queer first love with the same casual authenticity it treats everything else. David Hyde Pierce's Mr. Murdaugh, the drama teacher, lands the film's most formally composed scene with a grace that is both funny and genuinely affecting, and Audrey Grace Marshall's Cara, a self-appointed grief authority with a genius for inadvertent cruelty, is given one unexpectedly redemptive moment late in the film that lands with considerable power.

Direction and Technical Aspects: Intimate Filmmaking That Finds the Extraordinary in the Everyday

O'Sullivan and Thompson direct Mouse with the same intimacy and light touch that distinguished their previous work, scaled up with more resources but not fundamentally altered by them. Their instinct is always to find the emotional truth of a scene in its small gestures rather than its large declarations, and this film is consistent with that approach throughout. The camera operated by co-cinematographers Nate Hurtsellers and Luke Dyra favors close work, spending long periods in the proximity of faces, catching the microexpressions and subtle shifts that make Minnie and Helen's respective interior lives legible. This is a film that trusts its actors completely and builds its visual strategy around that trust.

The 2002 setting is rendered with an analog warmth that never tips into nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. The era is evoked through specific details, the CD and DVD store where Kat works, the particular texture of suburban Arkansas architecture, the cultural references that land with the specificity of actual memory rather than period decoration, all of it serving to ground the story in a world that feels genuinely inhabited rather than reconstructed. The visual language shifts subtly between the two domestic spaces at the film's center: Minnie's cluttered, animal-filled apartment carries a handheld immediacy that contrasts with the more measured, composed framing of Helen's spacious, carefully ordered home. This distinction reinforces character and class without ever drawing attention to itself.

The editing is generally assured, though as noted the middle section could be tightened without loss of emotional substance. Where the direction is most quietly impressive is in its management of tonal shifts. Mouse moves fluidly between genuine comedy and genuine heartbreak, sometimes within the same scene, without the transitions ever feeling forced or calculated. This is a difficult balance to maintain across 120 minutes, and O'Sullivan and Thompson sustain it with a skill that speaks to their deepening confidence as filmmakers.

Music and Atmosphere: Period Needle Drops and a Tender Score That Never Overreaches

The film's use of period music is one of its most immediately pleasurable qualities. Michelle Branch's All You Wanted, opening the film over the image of Minnie and Callie driving through summer Arkansas, immediately establishes tone and era with the kind of specificity that only well-chosen music can provide. The needle drops throughout are consistently excellent, selected for emotional resonance rather than easy nostalgia, culminating in a late-film use of Cyndi Lauper and Sarah McLachlan's acoustic version of Time After Time that lands with a poignancy that is entirely earned. The film knows exactly how much weight a song can carry and deploys that knowledge with consistent intelligence.

The piano score, which fits naturally into the film's world given Helen's background as a concert pianist, creates an atmosphere of warmth and interiority that keeps the film anchored even during its more challenging emotional passages. The overall soundscape of Mouse is one of its most carefully constructed elements, building a sonic world that feels consistent with the film's visual and emotional register. The sound design is grounded and naturalistic, with the ambient textures of suburban Arkansas in summer functioning almost as a character in their own right, reinforcing the sense that this is a specific place at a specific time in the lives of people who genuinely exist.

Strengths and Weaknesses

What works:

• Katherine Mallen Kupferer delivers a performance of exceptional restraint and precision that anchors the entire film and announces a major independent cinema presence.
• Sophie Okonedo brings layered emotional intelligence to Helen, producing the first genuinely Oscar-worthy performance of 2026.
• The screenplay's treatment of grief is unusually honest, refusing to compress loss into convenient dramatic stages while maintaining the film's warmth and humor throughout.
• The queer romance between Minnie and Kat is handled with a naturalness and absence of anxiety that is genuinely rare and refreshing.
• David Hyde Pierce's Mr. Murdaugh provides both the film's funniest and some of its most quietly affecting moments.
• The 2002 Arkansas setting is evoked through specific, well-chosen detail that grounds the story in genuine memory rather than nostalgic reconstruction.
• Tara Mallen's Barbara is a fully realized, warmly funny, and ultimately moving portrait of imperfect motherhood that the film treats with consistent empathy.
• The tonal balance between comedy and grief is managed with remarkable skill across the film's entire runtime.

What doesn't work:

• The 120-minute runtime has some slack, particularly in the middle section, where certain emotional beats are revisited slightly longer than they need to be.
• A handful of moments in the final act resolve with a neatness that slightly undercuts the film's otherwise consistent commitment to emotional complexity.
• Chloe Coleman's Callie, despite being the film's emotional catalyst, has limited screen time, which occasionally makes the depth of Minnie's attachment feel asserted rather than fully demonstrated.

Final Verdict: One of the Year's Most Quietly Devastating and Genuinely Humane Films

Rating: 9/10

Mouse earns its 9 out of 10 rating as a film that achieves something genuinely difficult: it makes grief funny, specific, messy, and deeply moving all at once, without sacrificing any of those qualities for the others. O'Sullivan and Thompson have made their best film, and that is saying something given the quality of what came before. This is a work of real emotional intelligence and accumulated craft, a film that knows its characters as completely as any film this year, and that treats them with a generosity that extends even to its most difficult personalities.

The audience most likely to be affected by Mouse are those who respond to emotionally honest, character-driven independent cinema: fans of O'Sullivan and Thompson's previous work will find their highest expectations met and surpassed, while admirers of films like Lady Bird, Ordinary People, or Waves will discover a film that engages similar emotional territory with a distinctive voice entirely its own. Anyone who has experienced the specific grief of losing a friend at a formative age, or who has found unexpected comfort in the most unlikely relationships, will find something here that feels like recognition. Parents of teenagers, teenagers themselves, and anyone navigating the complicated space between generations will all find different but equally valid entry points into the story.

Those seeking conventional narrative momentum or the familiar satisfactions of the coming-of-age genre may occasionally find Mouse's patient, unhurried approach testing. This is not a film that announces its revelations or structures itself around dramatic setpieces. Its pleasures accumulate quietly and its emotional impact registers most fully in retrospect, in the way certain scenes and gestures return to the mind unbidden hours after the film has ended. But for audiences willing to inhabit its tempo, Mouse offers something increasingly rare: cinema that trusts the full weight of ordinary human experience to be sufficient, and proves, conclusively, that it is.

Mouse premiered at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, Panorama section, on February 13, 2026. US distribution is currently being sought. Language: English. Runtime: 120 minutes.