Door Mouse
Written and Directed by Avan Jogia
Starring: Hayley Law, Keith Powers, Famke Janssen
Rated 14A 
Runtime: 101 minutes
Available digitally July 10

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

Where, oh where have the neo-noirs gone? Where are the hard-boiled detectives; the femme fatales; the sensationalized urbanity? Major contributions from Nolan, Fincher, and Villeneuve wear the genre as a husk to deliver desaturated, desensitized features, which speak to violence without thrills (good or bad). Refn, for all his neon-soaked aesthetic, is just as much a descendant of Bresson—etc. The cinema can still be full of surprises, but the seedy side of America isn’t doing it. So leave it to a Canadian, Avan Jogia, to deliver the goods.

Door Mouse is Jogia’s debut feature; the director has been acting in film and television since his mid-2000’s teendom, and has clearly developed a love for the craft. Spending time away in Hollywood after a childhood in Vancouver have colored the film with nostalgia for the west coast metropolis’s DIY punk past.

In a profile for Vacouver’s Stir, Jogia describes Door Mouse as “sort of a love letter to the punk rock, anti-establishment, misanthropic women I grew up around.” Its protagonist, Mouse (Hayley Law), is a woman of many hats: comics artist, burlesque performer, and–as she is propelled by her coworker Doe-Eyes’ (Nhi Do) mysterious disappearance–amateur sleuth. She’s tough-as-nails and morally uncompromising, which gets her into hot water. Every newly acquired lead is punctuated by the person giving it telling her she’s in too deep, directly at the camera, just so you remember.

Tailing behind Mouse is her friend, Ugly (Keith Powers), whom she’d rather shake off. He’s a bit too nice for her taste (nor ugly in appearance, for that matter), and she’s a lone wolf; yet Mouse is too much of a do-gooder not to have friends.

Sudbury, Ontario functions as a stand-in for Vancouver. Door Mouse is hardly sore for lacking the aquarium, or Stanley Park. It’s all about the locations no tourist can, or should know: the right burlesque bar, the right place to hock your bi-monthly horror porn comic. As a character, Mouse isn’t biographically rich—she’s a symbol, she doesn’t need to be. What grounds her in the story is always knowing the right guy. Or gal, since Mouse’s immediate support system is comprised almost entirely of women. Besides Mouse, Doe-Eyes, and Ugly, there’s Mama (Famke Janssen), the club’s owner, and Riz (Michela Cannon), a fellow performer. Solidarity is urgently needed; the conspiracy from above is already entrenched.

Even if Door Mouse is coming at this us-versus-them thinking from an anticapitalist perspective, its architecture is less a matter of following the money than one’s individual superstitions. Showcased in wide-lens photography, each interior has its own sense of feng shui. Mouse’s apartment may look pre-ransacked, but it’s an auspicious space for the hard-boiled woman; the bad idea that is sleeping with her drug-dealer ex, Mooney (Jogia), is punctuated for Mouse by the lack of desk, coffee, and fresh paper. A bad dream precedes bad coffee, which is an omen for the end of days. The surreality of it all causes occasional bursts from live-action to animation; the film’s events are the kind of dream which stains one’s waking life.

Opposing Vancouver’s nightlife are the pristine abodes of its brunching rich. Never have clear skies looked so empty. there is no skyline to speak of; the colours are clean and the lighting is natural: out of time and place, they display an alchemical beauty, the kind that makes you wonder how many people were sacrificed to make it appear.

The store’s owner professes to Mouse that her comics are collecting dust: it’s too experimental, whereas customers want “more serialized dramas.” He continues to explain that readers want characters to “go through an emotional journey before they jerk off.” The exchange winks to us, as a thinly veiled jab at an endemic roller-coaster catharsis within show business. Indeed, the knowledge Mouse gains doesn’t feel terribly change-eliciting. There’s a club of elites kidnapping sex workers—haven’t the Weinsteins, the Epsteins, and the Ed Bucks of the world gotten us too used to this plot?

What we see of the club is esoteric, but clean. The film’s biggest moment of tension is in an auction scene, where each cut is telegraphed by the rustle of the auctioneer’s sleeves, and the swish as each bettor raises their card.

On her search for Doe Eyes, Mouse begins to factor the whole serial narrative thing into her comics. Suddenly, she’s a sell-out success—but what do you do when the search is over, and life as you know it (and who knows how many lives she’s had) starts falling apart? It might be a backhanded compliment to say that I want to know the answer; that Door Mouse is worth a bevy of sequels a la The Thin Man. As much as Jogia knows how to craft a clean, no-nonsense (okay, some nonsense) thriller, there’s a missing flash-in-the-pan, DIY ethos to the film. It’s big, loud moments, right up to guitar-feedback score cues, feel too rehearsed. They’d be less annoying if they were actually jarring. But even Door Mouse’s obviousness is impassioned. You can see the beginnings of a director who still has a lot of room to experiment.