Door Mouse
Her art reflecting her life, Mouse’s “tits and guts” bi-monthly horror porn comic Whoreific isn’t selling enough to allow her to quit her night job as a burlesque act at her hangout, hideout and safe haven Mama’s where the owner does her best to take care of her girls, protecting them from patrons who think access extends beyond stage performances and trying to keep them off the drugs freely available on the streets.
Waking up one afternoon from “a nightmare of dread and foreboding,” Mouse’s trepidation is justified when Mama confirms that nobody has seen dancer Doe-Eyes; checking out her dishevelled apartment with Ugly, there’s no trace of where she went, and when Mouse’s friend Riz is snatched from right outside the nightclub it confirms their dread the girls are being targeted but offers no immediate clues as to who might have taken them.
Mouse self-sufficient and focused, protecting herself by maintaining emotional distance from even the few people she regards as friends, she is nevertheless loyal to them, placing herself in increasing danger as she investigates, Altered Carbon’s Hayley Law the spindle around which director Avan Jogia’s debut feature Door Mouse revolves alongside The Tomorrow War’s Keith Powers as Ugly, X-Men’s Famke Janssen as Mama and Jogia himself as surly drug dealer Moony.
Splicing live action with animated interludes, what initially seems to be a clever stylistic device to tie the two strands of Mouse’s life together later becomes a budgetary necessity as complex action sequences are sidestepped in favour of sketched panels, and while the camera similarly frames every scene as a comic panel the static result rapidly becomes stale, the torpid pace and languid delivery of dialogue becoming near unbearable.
Contrasting the dingy, black-walled club with the prestigious and exclusive Sophia Hotel where SurrealEstate‘s Elizabeth Saunders sits at the centre of the web of degraded desire and duplicity as the untouchable “Dame” who runs a flesh market for masked buyers, the film pushing the characters to extremes but selling itself short with a voiceover which conveys the twisted neo-noir mood of the undercity but does so at the cost of humanising the characters, the cast obviously capable of expressing more if only they were allowed.
Mouse unmoved by the suffering she witnesses even as she strives to end it, the performances are cold to the point of brittle, emotion not so much reserved as absent, perhaps exhausted by a lifetime of disappointment, Door Mouse instead reliant on Jogia’s script to hold attention that drifts increasingly as it drags itself through the motions, as flat as the small-press comic book page to which it aspires with any genuinely felt outrage or defiance confined to the lo-fi punk soundtrack.
Door Mouse will be available on digital download from Monday 10th July
