‘Mouse’ Review: Sophie Okonedo and Katherine Mallen Kupferer Shine in Tender Portrait of Grief and Growing Up [B+] Berlinale

It is the summer of 2002 in a suburban corner of Arkansas. Dust dances in golden light, toilet paper flutters from treetops after a teenage prank, and the final days before senior year feel like a promise waiting to be kept. Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) and Callie (Chloe Coleman) drive through North Little Rock with the windows down, singing along to Michelle Branch and imagining the futures that lie ahead of them. For a brief moment, everything feels possible. This is the kind of summer you think will last forever. Yet even in these sun soaked opening scenes, subtle fractures begin to show. This is a friendship built on imbalance. Callie is charismatic, talented, the star of the drama club, already envisioning herself at Juilliard. Her home is affluent and cultured, shaped by the poised and attentive presence of her mother Helen (Sophie Okonedo). Minnie, by contrast, exists in orbit. She lives with her single mother Barbara (Tara Mallen) in a cramped apartment filled with rescue dogs and improvised domestic routines. While Callie occupies the center of every room, Minnie remains an observer, so peripheral that even others fail to grasp how deeply connected the two girls truly are. One girl shines. The other watches.

Directors duo Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, whose first collaboration Saint Frances went to SXSW and follow up feature Ghostlight premiered at Sundance in 2024, take their time establishing this emotional ecosystem. Inspired from personal experiences by O’Sullivan’s teenage years, she chose to deliberately reject familiar high school clichés. There are no neatly coded cliques, no sharply drawn mean girls or swaggering jocks, no ironic commentary on social media culture. The setting may be familiar, but the film consciously avoids the shortcuts of the genre. It smells of Southern suburbia and early 2000s nostalgia, of a world that still felt analog and slower. At times, its devotion to atmosphere softens its narrative drive. Scenes linger longer than necessary, emotional beats are revisited from slightly different angles and the running time becomes noticeable. The intention is clear: grief should not be compressed into tidy dramatic arcs but allowed to unfold organically. Still, a sharper edit might have strengthened its impact without compromising its emotional truth. 

The film takes its most devastating turn when the source of that summer lightness becomes clear. A fatal car accident claims Callie’s life, shattering Minnie’s world. Yet Mouse resists melodrama, portraying loss not as a dramatic explosion but as a quiet, numbing vacuum. The question lingers: how do you grow up when the person who defined you is gone? Like Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, which has significantly shaped the coming of age genre over the past decade, the drama club serves as a central narrative space. Minnie’s biting reference to the ‘grief olympics’ skewers performative mourning among classmates like Cara (Audrey Grace Marshall), but the film avoids ridicule. When Mr. Murdaugh (David Hyde Pierce) reminds his students that heartbreak is real and everyone in the community is going through it but with different mechanisms, it becomes the film’s guiding principle. Grief is messy and contradictory and Minnie’s way of dealing with it is never judged, only allowed to exist.

That ultimately makes her develop a bond with Helen. Sophie Okonedo plays her as a woman balanced between composure and quiet unraveling, her turn to a psychic revealing a grief that feels painfully human. Drawn to the order and warmth of Helen’s home, Minnie mistakes proximity for healing. What develops between them is a surrogate mother daughter dynamic that is both tender and quietly harmful, pulling Minnie further from her own imperfect yet loving mother. Lead actress Katherine Mallen Kupferer anchors this tension with remarkable restraint. Her performance is subtle but deeply affecting, portraying Minnie not as a passive victim, but as a young woman tentatively shaping her identity through loss. She is a true standout and one hopes this is only the beginning of a strong presence in independent cinema.

Parallel to this unfolds a tender and understated romance between her character and Kat (Iman Vellani), a video store employee carrying her own emotional weight. The relationship never functions as a narrative rescue device. Instead, it feels like a natural extension of Minnie’s search for identity. Kat does not erase the pain, but she creates space for Minnie to exist outside of Callie’s shadow for the first time. First love doesn’t fix you. It reminds you that you’re still alive. And what is especially beautiful is the fact that same sex romance never feels performative in any shape or form. Rarely has a young queer love story been portrayed with such natural ease and quiet authenticity.

Mouse unfolds with an almost hushed grandeur. The camera lingers on small gestures and fleeting expressions, allowing the poetry of the film to emerge from ordinary moments rather than grand declarations. In nearly every frame, there is a palpable sense that the cast believes in what they are telling. The performances radiate sincerity beyond mere technique. This does not feel like a résumé builder or a calculated career move, but like a collective investment in meaningful storytelling. At a time when much of the industry is steered by franchise blueprints and algorithmic calculations, a film like Mouse serves as a quiet reminder of cinema’s core purpose. We go to the movies not for noise or scale, but for intimacy. For people who feel tangible. For stories that do not overwhelm us, but settle gently under the skin. It is a modest film with an expansive emotional reach.

The greatest lesson is the recognition that pain and possibility can coexist. You never stop missing someone. You just learn how to keep going. This conclusion won’t make Mouse revolutionary, but shows its greatest strength: Deep humanity. And in doing so, it becomes a film unafraid to let its characters remain complex, which is precisely why it lingers well beyond the final frame.

Grade: B+

This review is from the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, where Mouse had its world premiere in the Panorama section.