It’s the last day of junior high for Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) and her best friend Callie (Chloe Coleman); the veil of adulthood has never felt as thin as it does on that late-June morning in the car, blasting Michelle Branch’s 2002 pop hit “All You Wanted.” Branch belts “If you want to, I can save you//I can take you away from here” from the amped-up speakers as the two girls get ready to take on the world, or at least the day. This beautiful, unlikely friendship is at the heart of Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s Mouse, a coming-of-age drama with the lightest touch premiering in Berlinale’s Panorama section.
Mouse is an earnest follow-up to the duo’s 2024 film Ghostlight, set in the suburbs of Little Rock, Arkansas, where time ebbs and flows with an uncomfortable ease for the restless Callie. Coleman embodies the character with luminosity and vigor, conveying the impatience of growing up as a counterpoint to Kupferer’s timidity. It’s made very clear in the first few minutes that Callie and Minnie are like chalk and cheese—one is the popular girl at school who wows at drama club and dates the cutest guy; the other… is good at math—but Mouse knows better than to simplify teenage friendship by squaring it down to logic and merit. It’s not that others avoid commenting on the bizarre power imbalance. A tease here, a snipe there, and suddenly it seems that everybody else agrees: it simply doesn’t make sense.
Perhaps that bond formed in childhood is one that would have waned and solidified into memories of a shared past, but O’Sullivan’s concise script rules out that possibility with a terrible accident. It happens early on, and the rest focuses on Minnie as she is forced to imagine her life anew, sans best friend. While such a violent rupture in the plot could have weighed the film down completely, Mouse treads lightly in the steps of loss and grief. So delicate is its portrayal of a pathless, introverted teenage girl robbed of her mirror image that it almost feels like an angelic presence is guiding viewers along. When the journey of grief is never a straight road, guidance can take its own wrong turns and detours.
What makes Mouse special is its attention to women’s friendship (and kinship) across generations. There’s nuance and understanding to the way Minnie’s single mother Barbara (Tara Mullen) is portrayed as scattered, overworked, and stretching herself thin—even if the house is a mess, there’s warmth in this home where a few rescue dogs happily wag their tails and a foster baby boy gets more attention than Minnie. Conversely, Helen (Sophie Okonedo) is Callie’s stay-at-home mom who plays the piano and takes meticulous care of her affluent home, and it’s no surprise that the film finds its most treasured scenes at the intersection between her and Minnie. By zooming in on the complex relationship between a kid who’d rather consider herself motherless and a childless mother, Mouse takes on the responsibility to tell each story in full, splitting screen time between them individually and together as they grow closer, remembering Callie.
It’s no easy feat attending to these two headstrong characters, and O’Sullivan’s writing does more than simply highlight their similarities—it acknowledges the existing gaps in both age and role, as well as the grieving subjects. Shared loss is of utmost importance, and Mouse, in a way, is about Minnie learning to feel the spectrum of emotions that come with it, but the film keeps reminding her (and us) that she’s not alone, and neither are we in our own grief. A “grieving parents” support group, a school talent show in memoriam, and a first crush in the face of Kat (Iman Vellani) all provide opportunities for Helen and Minnie to connect through pain. Yet Mouse enacts the sore truth that everyone’s grief is different, and that is perhaps the most loving gesture extended by these filmmakers: to loosen that consoling embrace, allowing another more room to breathe through the tears.
Mouse premiered at the 2026 Berlinale.