Hey there, welcome back! For my final review from this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival, I take a look at what happens when a small-time thief searches for companionship with a penpal in.. Mouse (2025).
Title: Mouse
Director: Kenny Riches
Runtime: 1 hour 43 minutes
Denny (Kenny Riches) is a small-time thief in Salt Lake City who lives with his mother. While his main play is stealing bicycles to resell them, he makes sure to diversify his thievery. Denny also routinely goes “door checking”, where he checks to see if a car door handle is locked or not. If it’s open, he’ll go through and take loose change and anything else of value. If you’re wondering whether or not he feels guilty, he doesn’t. The way Denny sees it, it’s just stuff and the world is full of stuff.
His only rule is to not steal from old people.
One day, while attempting to resell some bikes, Denny is skimming the want ads when he sees an ad for a penpal. Denny says, “Loneliness, it makes you do strange things.” as he dials the number.
While everything during the call seems to be legitimate, what Denny doesn’t know is that the person on the other end is running a con.
Maury (Kimball Farley) is a degenerate with a gambling problem that now has him in a bind with his bookie. He, along with Tess (Sarah Coffey), run a fake penpal scam. They get people to sign up for a subscription to the service, Tess then builds trust with the penpal, and eventually begin asking for things from them. For what it’s worth, it’s served them well up to this point.
Denny uses a stolen credit card and a different identity to sign up for the penpal subscription. He and Tess begin writing back and forth and Denny begins to open up, revealing personal details about his life. As things progress between them, they eventually agree to meet.
What could possibly go wrong?
One thing that I really appreciated about Mouse (2025) is that Kenny Riches wasn’t afraid to spend time setting up each character. With Denny, we see that he isn’t a completely awful person. Yes, he has his flaws, but he cares deeply about his mother. The fact that he doesn’t run any cons on old people and instead prefers to focus on the rich as his targets gives Denny appeal to anyone opposed to the uber wealthy.
Meanwhile with Tess, again not without her own flaws, we see that sometimes she’s only in the game in order to get Maury out of a bind. And if she sees a prior mark while out and about, she never feels good about it. So maybe it is possible that there’s a decent person in there after all.
Because we spend time getting to know Denny and Tess, along with their motivations, it’s incredibly easy to become invested in their outcomes. It also helps that both Riches and Sarah Coffey were great in their respective roles. They both were able to bring the perfect balance of vulnerability and coldheartedness to Denny and Tess. Allowing us to, sometimes simultaneously, root for and against them.
I also enjoyed the choices made with lighting. As a small-time thief, Denny lives his life in the shadows. We see this in nearly every scene, whether he’s sitting in his mother’s house or wandering the aisles of a store.
The clever writing and strong lead performances have me hoping that Mouse (2025) gets a chance to find a larger audience.