Director Statement My goal with Mouse was to make a pin-sharp thriller, which both uses and subverts the tropes of the horror and thriller genres. The film follows a young woman, as she walks home at night through a predatory city. Mouse is not intended as profound comment on the dangers that women too often face in this situation. However, I hope it challenges the audience to think about our female protagonist: do they feel outraged on her behalf, or do they engage in victim-blaming by questioning her decision to walk home after a violent encounter. The ending hopes to obliterate any pre-conceived notions that the audience might have held about our characters. After giving the viewer some much needed catharsis, the film then pushes far beyond anything they might have hoped for, forcing the audience to consider if this is this still what they really wanted. In terms of execution, Mouse was an experiment in visual storytelling. Most of our lived experience takes place underneath the level of verbal expression: in the realm of physicality, body language and glances across a room. I wanted to explore this by removing dialogue as an option for storytelling. My aim was to create a film in which there was either no dialogue, or where any dialogue was only surface-level chatter and a distraction from the real, explicit and threatening physical conversation taking place between the characters.