The making of Mouse gave some Arkansas mothers a very good reason to have kept their daughters’ prom dresses. Costume designer Meg Grace put out a call on Facebook; in the week before the school-dance sequence was filmed, a member of her team drove around town collecting gowns, filling a van. Altogether, they gathered some 50 dresses worn to proms between 2000 and 2003. “It felt like a time warp,” Grace says of seeing them on the actors.
That flicker of recognition runs through the funny, affecting film from Ghostlight directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson. Set in 2002 in O’Sullivan’s hometown of North Little Rock, Arkansas, Mouse follows Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), a teenager accustomed to living in the shadow of her charismatic best friend, Callie (Chloe Coleman). After Callie’s sudden death, Minnie gravitates toward her friend’s poised mother, Helen (Sophie Okonedo), and the inviting home she has long preferred to her own. Their bond grows more complicated, shaped by affection, grief, and that familiar teenage longing to be someone else.
Mouse is particularly attuned to how a teenager’s dissatisfaction can attach itself to almost anything: imperfect skin,
