One of Sophie Okonedo's first days on the set of "Mouse" was the funeral scene. The room was full of actors playing it solemn, everyone giving the grieving mother her space. Then co-director Alex Thompson sat down beside her in the front row, and Okonedo looked up with an impish smile.
"This moment is hilarious, isn't it?" she asked, as Thompson recalled it.
That moment encapsulates the entire movie in miniature. "Mouse," the third feature from husband-and-wife filmmakers Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson, understands something most grief films are too polite to admit: Joy doesn't wait for permission. It shows up in the middle of the worst year of your life, and guilt follows right behind it.
Set in the summer of 2002 in North Little Rock, Arkansas, O'Sullivan's hometown, the film follows shy 17-year-old Minnie Dunn (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) after the death of her charismatic best friend, Callie Bell (Chloe Coleman), and the unlikely bond Minnie forms with Callie's mother, Helen (Okonedo). It premiered in February in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Teddy Award, and it is a Best Feature nominee at the Gotham Awards on Nov. 30.
O'Sullivan, Thompson, Okonedo, and Kupferer gathered for a virtual press conference on Oct. 27, moderated by critic Scott Mantz, who noted the film sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Chasing the messy truth
"Mouse" is not the follow-up it looks like. O'Sullivan said she finished the first draft in 2019, well before "Ghostlight," the duo's 2024 Sundance breakout. The larger scale of the project simply resulted in a longer production time.
What "Ghostlight" gave them was nerve. That film was built around everyday people who rarely get screen time, and audiences responded.
"What we learned is that my feelings about Callie reflect my struggle to pursue the messy truth while also incorporating a lot of humor and heart, which is an instinct worth following," O'Sullivan said.
The messy truth here is personal. O'Sullivan said she lost a friend in high school and remembers catching herself having fun at a dance or while toilet-papering a house during senior year, then thinking she shouldn't be. "Again, this experience reflects the difference between the reality of grief and our expectations of it," she said.
The guilt of being found
The film's sharpest irony is that losing Callie gives Minnie room to become someone she might never have been in her best friend's shadow. O'Sullivan said she wanted that complicated feeling in the script from the start, even if it made her characters like themselves less.
"All these things that we think we're supposed to feel, rather than the things that we actually feel that are quite human," she said.
That tension lands in Minnie's scenes with Kat (Iman Vellani), a video store clerk who lost her mother a year earlier. Kat is distant enough from the loss for Minnie to pose a question she cannot ask Helen: Do you ever feel guilty for enjoying yourself? O'Sullivan pointed to one line as the film's emotional hinge: when Minnie tells Kat she likes that Kat knows her without Callie.
"I've been longing to be known as somebody other than the sidekick or the shadow," O'Sullivan said, describing what sits under the line.
Kupferer, who was 16 during filming two years ago, said she leaned on the page and on Vellani, whose bubbly energy made the turn from grief to laughter easy. "When she sticks her tongue out, and it's bright red, you know, those things are funny," she said.
Okonedo: 'I can't lie at all.'
Okonedo, an Oscar and Emmy nominee, signed on before she had seen "Ghostlight" or met the directors. She said she called her agent the moment she finished the script.
"It's not like the usual way that films deal with grief," she said. "And also it's just really funny."
She has lived that contradiction. Okonedo said she has been through grief herself and remembers laugh-out-loud moments in the middle of something awful, the kind you couldn't put in a film. "Mouse" puts them in.
Then she paid her directors the compliment of the afternoon. "I feel that Alex and Kelly are just critical filmmakers currently," she said. "I feel there's no one talking about America in this way, really nobody."
O'Sullivan asked if someone could clip that and send it to them for their dark nights of the soul.
The role cost Okonedo something. She said her husband always asks who she is playing next because the character comes home with her. "Quite liked Cleopatra, didn't like Medea so much," she said. The grief group scene, along with the day Helen learns of the accident, left her feeling heavy for days.
Her process starts long before the camera rolls. Coming off a year that also includes "Clarissa," in which she plays Clarissa Dalloway, Okonedo said she studies how a character arrived where the story finds her. For Helen, that meant asking how an Englishwoman trained as a classical pianist ended up in Arkansas. Her one text change was small and telling: She asked to say "conservatoire," the British word, instead of "conservatory."
On set, she clears her mind and lets it happen. "I'm incredibly sensitive," she said. "Any suggestion that Kelly or Alex whispers in my ear for a scene immediately affects me emotionally and is reflected on my face, which makes me good for acting but not so good for life." "I can't lie at all."
The film gives teenage girls the "Phantom Thread" treatment.
Thompson's visual references raise eyebrows for a coming-of-age film: Paul Thomas Anderson's "Phantom Thread" and Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line." His point was dignity.
Thompson said, "Teenage stories are usually less dignified than adult stories. " Teen films, he said, tend to be candy-colored and live outside reality. He wanted a frame so detailed it felt like it could go on forever, with the natural light and color those films give a fashion designer or a soldier.
His broader influences read like a master class: Sarah Polley, Kelly Reichardt, Steven Soderbergh, Sidney Lumet, Raoul Walsh, and Michael Curtiz. He compared them to modernist writers who photograph real life but place the audience inside the experience.
The film's mix of comedy and heartbreak was never engineered beat by beat, he said. "We are not distinguishing between comedic beats and dramatic beats," Thompson said. "There is no pivot on set."
O'Sullivan said her job at the script stage is usually the opposite of adding jokes. "I tend to make things sillier," she said. "And then we have to cut back."
Rehearsal was light on time and heavy on carbs: a read-through of the big scenes, then cheese, crackers, and, per Thompson, excellent bagels at the Airbnb Kupferer shared with her mother, co-star Tara Mallen. O'Sullivan said the goal was to stress-test the text and save the magic for when the camera rolled.
A friendship that didn't need acting
For the grief to land, the audience has to believe in Callie before she's gone. Kupferer said that part was simple. She and Coleman clicked on day zero of filming.
They rode to set together, studied in the same schoolroom between takes, watched "Good Will Hunting" for the first time together, and sang along to Michelle Branch in the car. Kupferer said she had just returned from a three-day trip to Los Angeles spent entirely with Coleman.
"Everything that you see me feeling about Callie is how I feel about Chloe," she said.
Okonedo said Kupferer, whose parents are both theater actors, arrives fully prepared and then plays completely free once the camera rolls. "You can throw anything at Katherine, and she's going to respond a different way each time," Okonedo said.
The payoff came in Berlin. It was Kupferer's first trip to Germany and only her second time out of the country, and she had refused to watch the film until she could see it on a big screen. The house was packed. When it ended, she said, the audience stood and applauded for about three minutes.
"I was like, oh my gosh, thank God, because I was so proud of it," she said. Okonedo added that people flew in from Arkansas for the premiere and that nobody slept.
'I Hope You Dance'
The conversation ended where the film's heart lives: on a song. Asked about Lee Ann Womack's "I Hope You Dance," O'Sullivan lit up. She danced to it in high school, she said, and the early-2000s soundtrack does double duty, placing the audience in 2002 while saying what the characters can't.
She hears Helen in that song: a mother wishing a girl a wonderful life while carrying her own unbearable loss. Then there's a needle drop when Minnie walks into a party, featuring a song that asks who that girl is, coinciding perfectly with the moment Minnie is discovering her identity.
How did they get the rights? "We had a great music supervisor," O'Sullivan said.
"Yes," Thompson added. "We paid."
It was a fitting last laugh. "Mouse" argues that grief is not the absence of joy. It is joy arriving with an asterisk and the courage to dance anyway.
"Mouse" opened in theaters this summer and is nominated for Best Feature at the Gotham Awards, to be presented Nov. 30.
