Sundance Rejected 'Mouse' Twice. Berlin Stepped In, and It's One of the Year's Best

Sundance turned down "Mouse" — not once, but twice — and the film still became a Gotham Award nominee for Best Feature and one of the year's most acclaimed indies. Directed by Chicago duo Alex Thompson and Kelly O'Sullivan, the coming-of-age grief drama is now playing in New York and Los Angeles through Independent Film Company, with a wider expansion set for November.

The rejection still puzzles the filmmakers, whose previous feature, the 2024 comedy-drama "Ghostlight," premiered at Sundance to critical acclaim. "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.

What happened after the second rejection?

The Berlin Film Festival programmed "Mouse" in its Panorama section in February, marking the directors' first European festival premiere. Thompson called it "a career opportunity that went way beyond Sundance" and described playing Berlin's historic stage as "absolutely mind-blowing. I've never been in a theater that big with a movie."

O'Sullivan said the Sundance feedback — "a game of telephone, so we don't know" — was that the film "had real champions, but that it also had people who didn't get it. Yes, it was crushing. It was confusing." She kept thinking of the cast and crew: "I feel like they deserve a really big stage."

Thompson framed it plainly: "It's kind of like when you get rejected in high school, but then you end up thinking back, and you're married, and you're like, 'That wasn't the right fit.'" O'Sullivan's answer: "You want to be with somebody who wants to be with you."

What is 'Mouse' about?

The film follows Minnie Dunn (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), a girl entering her senior year in 2002 — Michelle Branch on the radio, September 11 less than a year out — when a tragic accident takes her lifelong best friend. Minnie forms a close bond with the girl's British mother, Helen, played by a luminescent Sophie Okonedo, while her classmates compete to grieve loudest through a talent show. Critics have compared its texture and emotional depth to Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret."

O'Sullivan wrote the script in 2019, drawing on her own experience of loss as a teen, around the time their debut "Saint Frances" opened at SXSW and won the Austin festival's audience award (it later earned a John Cassavetes Spirit Award nomination). "Mouse" was meant to be their next feature — until COVID derailed the financing and cast, and "Ghostlight" became the Sundance debut instead. Production resumed in fall 2024, shooting on location in O'Sullivan's home state of Arkansas. "Nothing got cut for budget," she said.

The budget was $3 million, a figure Thompson volunteered. As producer, he treats budgeting as his "superpower": "You can pretty much afford anything. You just have to give somewhere else." The 30-day shoot yielded a two-hour-15-minute cut, later trimmed by 20 minutes.

That indie resourcefulness shows on screen. A sleepover scene where Minnie and friends watch "Titanic" is entirely constructed: the team mixed at Skywalker, rebuilt the dance scene using the facility's "Titanic" effects library and public-domain Irish music, with O'Sullivan and producer Pierce Cravens voicing Leo and Kate off-camera. "If you watch the movie, you think they're watching 'Titanic' in the basement, but it's a totally constructed thing," Thompson said.

How personal did the production get?

Extremely. Toward the end of the shoot, O'Sullivan's own mother died in Arkansas, leaving the writer-actor grieving on set while directing alongside her life partner, with whom she has two children. "The movie allowed me to be there literally when she died. I didn't have to get on a plane," she said. Back on set, "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 film's climactic ballet elegy, set to a cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time," was choreographed by Christen Pitts — O'Sullivan's actual high school dance teacher. "It feels like a culmination of my entire adult life and teenage years and echoes of the past existing," O'Sullivan said.

What does this change for the filmmakers?

Despite Hollywood offers, the pair are staying rooted in Chicago. "I like writing from a place of specificity," O'Sullivan said. "I just don't feel compelled to" write about Los Angeles or New York. Now set up at Gersh, Thompson aims for volume: "If we want to make a movie every 15 months, we probably can't do that in the studio system." He cites Steven Soderbergh and Sidney Lumet as models, directors "who have dozens of films by the time they stop."

Two new films are expected in 2027: a high-concept body-swap comedy starring real-life father-daughter pair Keith Kupferer and Katherine Mallen Kupferer (now in post-production), and the co-directed "The Steel Harp" with Lois Smith. "It's a total gamble. I've got no idea if it's going to work," Thompson said of the body-swap film. "It seems to be quite funny according to my three-year-old."

After two rejections, a pandemic and a devastating personal loss, "Mouse" arrives as proof the couple's scrappy model works — and that the festival that said no twice may have been the wrong fit all along.