Rejected Twice by Sundance, ‘Mouse’ Is One of the Year’s Best Movies. Why Aren’t More People Talking About It?

Don’t be surprised if you emerge from Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan’s piercingly moving coming-of-age grief dramedy “Mouse” in a puddle of tears. Graceful in technique, compassionate in its writing, this movie, one of the year’s best, is a crying machine. But that’s not to say this story of a high school girl’s (Katherine Mallen Kupferer, astonishing) formative first encounter with major loss is any bit manipulative.

As heartbreak ripples through a small town, “Mouse” has the texture and deep feeling of Kenneth Lonergan’s post-9/11 New York City drama “Margaret,” starring Anna Paquin as a precocious teenager in freefall after witnessing a pedestrian’s brutal death. Unlike “Margaret,” “Mouse” didn’t take over half a decade to reach screens after production wrapped, but the road was still paved with rejection (baffling in retrospect) for Chicago directing duo Thompson and O’Sullivan.

With “Mouse,” the filmmakers found themselves at the Berlin Film Festival for the first time back in February — even as an American indie set in Arkansas about the challenges of coming of age feels like catnip for a festival like Sundance, where such topics are historically de rigueur. And Thompson and O’Sullivan had been to Sundance before, with their critically championed 2024 comedy-drama “Ghostlight,” about an emotionally ramshackle, rookie community theater production of “Romeo and Juliet.” While placement at the legacy indie festival, headed to Boulder in January, doesn’t always mean you’re grandfathered into the acceptance pipeline for your next movie, it was still a surprise to the directors (who are also life partners with two children) when Sundance turned down “Mouse” not once, but twice.

“To be totally fair, we submitted before we probably should have, with a long cut,” O’Sullivan told IndieWire over Zoom. “Apparently, it didn’t matter,” Thompson added.

“We submitted it again the next year, when it was tighter,” added O’Sullivan, though the filmmakers were dismissed again. “The feedback that we got — and again, this is a game of telephone, so we don’t know — is that it had real champions, but that it also had people who didn’t get it. Yes, it was crushing. It was confusing. More than anything, I was like, ‘Wait, but people did such great work on this movie. The work is incredible.’ And not ours even, but Sophie [Okonedo] and Katherine [Mallen Kupferer], and the crew, I was like, ‘I feel like they deserve a really big stage.’”

‘Mouse’Nate Hurtsellers and Luke Dyra

Luckily, the Berlin Film Festival stepped in to program “Mouse” in the Panorama section, marking Thompson and O’Sullivan’s first bow at a European fest, where it grabbed strong reviews. And, as the filmmakers point out, that festival turned out to be the proper home. (Berlin, after all, just had its strongest lineup in years, under artistic director Tricia Tuttle’s second festival.)

“It really was hard for a moment, and then we heard back from Berlin, and it kind of felt like a career opportunity that went way beyond Sundance,” Thompson said. “Tapping into the narrative outside of the American indie felt like something we’d always aspired to. And those are the films that I identify with the most, the sort of work that comes out of those great European festivals. The most jealous and childish I am is every year when the Venice reviews start coming out, and it’s like, ‘Ah, well, those all sound great.’ And Cannes and Berlin, and our favorite festivals, we have a relationship with Thessaloniki and American Film Festival in Wrocław, and to have that stage at Berlin, it’s like this sort of historic stage. It’s absolutely mind-blowing. I’ve never been in a theater that big with a movie.”

A Gotham nominee for Best Feature, “Mouse” is now quietly in theaters from Independent Film Company. (A sparsely attended Academy screening also took place in Los Angeles over the weekend.) Film chatterers may deem this a “small” movie in a year of “You Can See Everything” and “La Bola Negra,” it is huge in every way.

The film follows Minnie Dunn (Kupferer), who, just as she’s about to enter her senior year, is dealt a life-altering loss. It’s 2002, Michelle Branch is on the radio, and September 11 is not even a year out of view. Faced with a hole in her life in the shape of her lifelong best friend after a tragic accident, Minnie forms a tight bond with the girl’s British stay-at-home mother, Helen (Sophie Okonedo, luminescent here), mourning on her own. Meanwhile, Minnie’s classmates all but literally compete to see who can grieve the loudest in the form of a talent show. “Mouse” is about the centrifugal force of grief and how life goes on around you, but you’re still stuck in the same place.

Big on emotional generosity and ace turns from the filmmakers’ stable of theater-based Chicago actors — including Kupferer and her real-life mother Tara Mallen, who plays Minnie’s struggling, lower-middle-class mom onscreen — “Mouse” deserves as much attention as any of the year’s best films. The grand ambition of “Mouse” and its emotional dividends and wonderful performances suggest it could’ve cleaned up at Telluride or even Toronto, where, in the latter case, a number of indie films flopped, and even the most acclaimed are still searching for distribution.

‘Mouse’©IFC Films/Courtesy Everett Collection

“Rejected, rejected,” O’Sullivan laughed, later adding, “We understand how complicated programming a festival is, and we don’t feel entitled to be programmed anywhere. We’re grateful to every festival that’s given us a slot.”

She wrote the script for “Mouse” in 2019, around the time their debut feature as collaborators, “Saint Frances,” opened at SXSW. That microbudget indie, directed by Thompson and starring O’Sullivan as a drifting 34-year-old nanny in Chicago, won the Austin festival’s audience award and later earned a John Cassavetes Spirit Award nomination. “Mouse” was actually meant to be their next feature, with one financier, a cushier budget, and a slightly different cast — until the strikes changed their plans, leading to “Ghostlight” as their Sundance debut on a smaller scale.

Based on O’Sullivan’s own experience with loss as a teen, “Mouse” picked back up in fall 2024, shooting on location in her home state of Arkansas. “We were amazingly able to retain the vision” of “Mouse” from before the strikes, she said. “Nothing got cut for budget.”

Thompson, who produced the film, said, “Knowing the budget so intimately, I guess that’s my superpower on the producing side that most directors don’t have is I just get really intimate with the budget. And it seems really boring, but it’s kind of like a script where if you don’t have the means, if it’s not there in the budget, it’s not going to happen… A lot of directors I talked to have been like, ‘Oh, well, my producer said we couldn’t do a rain tower, or my producers said we couldn’t do this shot because we can’t afford it.’ And it’s like, well, you can pretty much afford anything. You just have to give somewhere else. We tend to make really ambitious one-liners like schedules. We had 30 days on this, but that ended up being a two-hour and 15-minute movie, and we cut 20 minutes.”

When asked about the “Mouse” budget, he said, “I think we can say. We’re already underdogs. We might as well say. It was $3 million.”

And it’s $3 million, well-budgeted and in true indie spirit — like a scene where Minnie and her friends watch “Titanic” in a parent’s basement during one of those classic sleepovers where private confidences spill out, insulated from the adult world upstairs and outside.

“We didn’t even try to get the rights to ‘Titanic,’ but we’re mixing at Skywalker,” Thompson said. “They have the entire effects library for ‘Titanic’ … so we rebuilt the dance scene in ‘Titanic’ and used public-domain Irish music, and then Kelly and [producer] Pierce Cravens do the voices of Leo and Kate off in a room being like, ‘I feel so young,’ or something, whatever that is. If you watch the movie, you think they’re watching ‘Titanic’ in the basement, but it’s a totally constructed thing because we’re like, ‘We can’t get the rights to this.'”

On top of “Mouse” already dwelling on a very specific point of loss from O’Sullivan’s own childhood, the filmmaker’s mother also died in Arkansas toward the end of production. That meant she was actively grieving while also leading a set, alongside her partner.

‘Mouse’©IFC Films/Courtesy Everett Collection

“It was so bizarre,” O’Sullivan said. “She died when we had a week and a half left to shoot… It was incredibly complicated. I just couldn’t believe the timing of it for so many different reasons. I mean, one of which is just that it took forever to make this movie, but the movie allowed me to be there literally when she died. I didn’t have to get on a plane. But then when I was back on set, I just kept hearing these lines that I had written, and they took on a whole new meaning… lines that I had sort of written in a very theoretical way all of a sudden were hitting me in a, ‘God, I can’t believe how true this was, and I didn’t even know.'”

The autobiography that drove “Mouse” extended behind the scenes in even more literal ways. Christen Pitts, the choreographer behind the movie’s climactic ballet elegy sequence set to a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” was O’Sullivan’s high school dance teacher. “It feels like so many different chapters of my life are just compressing into the same space, and it feels like a culmination of my entire adult life and teenage years and echoes of the past existing,” O’Sullivan said.

Thompson and O’Sullivan have maintained their filmmaking footprint in and around Chicago — even as “Mouse” brought them to Arkansas — and they don’t feel especially tempted to make the leap to Hollywood, though there have been offers.

“I just write from a place of experience most of the time, and I don’t know, I’ve seen so many movies set in L.A. and New York, and I actually don’t identify with those towns,” O’Sullivan said. “I feel like enough people are doing that, and I like writing from a place of specificity … I’ve spent maybe a year in both places cumulatively. It doesn’t feel like a character that I personally need to explore. But having said that, if I spent more time there, it felt like a story was necessarily set there. I’d be open to it. I just don’t feel compelled to.”

“We really want to have a body of work,” Thompson said. “The people I admire the most are Steven Soderbergh and Sidney Lumet, directors who have dozens of films by the time they stop, and Soderbergh has not stopped, obviously.” He doesn’t know that a move to Los Angeles is possible given their artistic goals. “We’ve gone out on meetings, we’ve done pitches, we’ve considered projects from studios, and the timeline always felt kind of like it just hasn’t really worked out. ‘Mouse’ was so close to being that thing, and then the writers’ strike, and the SAG strike, we lost a cast member, and it just all fell away. So we just thought, ‘What if we just do what we did on ‘Ghostlight,’ but on steroids? If I can raise half a million dollars, I wonder if we can raise three.”

With the filmmakers now set up at Gersh talent agency, he added, “If we want to make a movie every 15 months, we probably can’t do that in the studio system. I think we both like the idea of playing in a bigger sandbox and taking the intimacy, taking all the things we’ve learned, and working in a bigger sandbox. I don’t think that’s unattractive, but it’s just, for the way we work, this has made the most sense so far.”

Next up, Thompson directed a high-concept body-swap comedy starring the “Ghostlight” father-daughter (and real-life father-daughter) team of “Mouse” star Katherine Mallen Kupferer with Keith Kupferer. Plus, they’ve co-directed “The Steel Harp,” starring Lois Smith and O’Sullivan in a return to acting. Both are expected in 2027.

“We shoot on the same lenses as ‘Saint Frances,’ same aspect ratio as ‘Mouse,’ in a world that winks at a bigger sandbox,” Thompson said of the body swap movie. “It’s a total gamble. I’ve got no idea if it’s going to work… It seems to be quite funny according to my three-year-old.”

“Mouse” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with a wider expansion to follow in November.