Mouse Review: The Left Behind

In a high school theatre class, running through improvisatory exercises, the teacher (David Hyde Pierce) coaches his students as they mill around the room. First, what does your public self look like? Most students throw their arms wide, all performative bigness. Only one student, Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), takes the opposite posture, curling her body in, taking up less space, not more. Then the teacher prompts the opposite: What does your private self look like? The effect is the same on the students, only in reverse: To a one, they become smaller, sadder versions of themselves – save Minnie. As stark as a light switch flipped, Minnie expands, becomes lighter, is lit up.

Minnie has some experience with living in a shadow. Her best friend Callie (Chloe Coleman) is a starburst of charisma, lovely and animated and always the center of attention. Callie has big dreams of attending Juilliard that are nurtured by her mother (Sophie Okonedo), a former concert pianist, and that she will be a success seems foregone. It can’t be easy for Minnie, who is sharp-witted but struggles to make herself heard, and is much less affluent and put-together than Callie and her popular-girl crew. At a slumber party, one particularly toxic mean girl among them invents a game called “playing personal feedback” – really, just an excuse to say unkind things with an insincere smile. Her personal feedback to Minnie? “I always kind of forget you exist.” 

As far as barbs go, that hits the bullseye of breathtakingly cruel. Screenwriter/co-director Kelly O’Sullivan (Saint Frances) has an infallible ear for the way teen girls communicate – not just the awful things, but the cellular connection Callie and Minnie share, too, a deep love and understanding of each other, despite their differences. Which makes it that much more painful when, ahead of their senior year of high school, there is an accident, and Minnie has to figure out who she is, definitionally, without Callie by her side. 

Mouse is not a “hang” movie in the traditional sense, where you want to soak up the fun vibes. The vibes here are not fun. But it’s company I wanted to keep. Mouse is steeped with compassion and an unhurried energy that mimics the tiny joys and friction points of everyday life. Even, or especially, when you’re wading through terrible loss. You still go to work, go to school. You still have to think about dinner. You still get to have a first kiss. That this forms the bedrock of the drama – and not histrionics or ham-fisted plot twists – is a mark of the filmmakers’ confidence that “relatably human” can and should be something to strive for at the movies.

Those same qualities distinguished Ghostlight, O’Sullivan and co-director Alex Thompson’s previous film. That’s not all that’s carried over from the similarly moving (if more overtly tearjerking) Ghostlight; it too trafficked in the grief of those left behind and the role theatre can play in building a person back up – so much so that both films build toward a third-act performance, though the effect here is very different. 

They also share two key performers – the remarkable teenage actor Katherine Mallen Kupferer (believably awkward but also glinting of the confident cool person you know Minnie will grow into eventually) and her real-life mother, stage veteran Tara Mallen, playing Minnie’s harried single mom. (The duo also played mother and daughter in Ghostlight, though that film’s emphasis was on dad Keith Kupferer.) Pitted, unintentionally at least, between them is Okonedo as Callie’s elegant and cultured mother. I don’t know if Okonedo has ever been anything less than engrossing on film, but she’s next level here – an at-first-glance perfect mom come perfectly undone, playing every flavor of pain from konked-out to caustically funny. 

Funny, yes. And full of grace, even for the mean girl. The effect, in total, is that most rare thing – a feel-good grief movie.

Mouse

2026, NR, 120 min. Directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson. Starring Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Sophie Okonedo, Chloe Coleman, Tara Mallen, Iman Vellani, David Hyde Pierce.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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