Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Door Mouse’ on Hulu, a Hit-and-Miss Exercise in Goth-Comics Style

The spirit of comic books, noir and ’90s ironic detachment permeates Door Mouse (now on Hulu), the feature directorial debut of Avan Jogia starring Riverdale‘s Hayley Law as a serially blase woman attempting to infiltrate a nasty human trafficking ring. The movie exists somewhere in a milieu of Frank Miller, Tim Burton, Hot Topic and the type of indie movies that come precariously close to addressing heavy-duty subject matter at arm’s length, so you can’t say it’s not ambitious. But is it functional? Let’s get analytical and find out.  

DOOR MOUSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Voiceover narration: “Every morning I wake up in the afternoon.” The script is full of stuff like this. Clever. Stylized. Slightly annoying. That’s the voice of Mouse (Law). She wakes up every morning (in the afternoon) in an apartment littered with dirty laundry and scuzzy dishes. She puts a lotta muscle into her markers as she draws horror-porn comix held together with duct tape and delivers them to the local shop where they don’t sell. Then at night she works at an ubergoth burlesque club as a dancer/performer/whatever who plugs in a ball gag and puts herself in a pillory and lets someone else whale on her bum. She’d rather be penciling and inking.

The club is run by Mama (Famke Janssen), and Mouse’s co-workers include Riz (Michela Cannon) and Doe Eyes (Nhi Do) and her best friend is Ugly (Keith Powers), who’s anything but, walking around all quiet-like in his Michael Jackson fedora, floods, white socks and loafers. Yes, nobody around here has real names except maybe Mouse’s occasional f—buddy Mooney (Jogia) and definitely frequent club proprietor Eddie (Donal Logue), who wears a suit and is enough of a normie to not deserve a flip, hip ironic moniker. 

But there’s trouble in this scene and it walks in and snatches Doe Eyes off the street. The cops don’t give a rip and Mama don’t have the energy so Mouse takes it upon herself to investigate, which requires sniffing around the filthy domiciles of scuzzbuckets with names like Craw Daddy and The Dame. Her nosy nosing around leads her to believe some real tenderheart blokes are kidnapping women and forcing them into prostitution, and that’s when shit gets real dangerous. None of this is much fun, but Mouse is the kind of person who doesn’t get excited about fun things. Or anything, to be honest. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Door Mouse is Sin City with a touch of Nicolas Winding-Refn fetish, some Ghost World indie-comic squashed-flat-line-reading vibes and a whiff or three of Burton’s Batmans.

Performance Worth Watching: Seen-it-all Hollywood veteran Janssen brings some flair and gravitas to a classic, drop-in supporting role; she’s dialed in without being overwrought. 

Memorable Dialogue: “You only wanted a nibble. But it looks like you got the whole wheel of cheese, didn’t you, little Door Mouse?”

Sex and Skin: Surprisingly little, considering the sleazy setting.

Our Take: Door Mouse has too much style, too much affectation, and not enough character. Law’s characterization of Mouse is that of a woman so cynical that nothing fazes her. She’s unflappable. Full of pessimistic, tossed-off quips about the end of the world. Steamrollered by the inevitability of death. A walking, monotone-talking embodiment of MEH. The pervasive negativity of this existence rarely penetrates her sour demeanor – so much so, we often feel like we don’t have much of a shot at understanding what makes her tick, or catching even a slight whiff of a reason why she is who she is and she does what she does. She has a strong moral center in that she wants to help and protect her own, but not much beyond that. And she lives in a setting that feels less like a time and place, and more like an overwrought aesthetic, which waters down the dramatic impact of a story about trafficking, abuse and exploitation.

But again, there’s ambition here, and Jogia shows vision, obvious as his amalgam of influences can be. One gets the sense that the director, possibly realizing this might be his only elusive shot at making a film on his own terms, crams in all of his ideas: A riot grrrl soundtrack, animated comic-book sequences, noir cliches, overwritten dialogue, characters more defined by their fashion than their actions – cool stuff that maybe knows all too well that it’s cool and therefore becomes less cool. I wavered between admiring the film and being annoyed by it; your mileage may vary.  

Our Call: I’m on the fence here. Door Mouse doesn’t have much to say, but plenty to show us. That’s something, but it’s not quite enough. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.