ANThe center of the agonizing dramatic mass is a conversation of overwhelming difficulty, the kind that makes you shudder when you even think about how it could happen. Watching it unfold for almost two hours is then a kind of endurance test, an often suffocating experience trapped in a room with four people who do not want to be there, but know they must, driven by the vain hope that perhaps can end some of the paralyzing pain that everyone is trapped with. It is to go deeper into the darkness to try to see the light, to ask difficult questions knowing that the answers will be even more difficult, a dark but necessary torture chamber.
It takes place six years after a devastatingly familiar tragedy: a high school shooting. A room in a church is being prepared for a meeting between two pairs of parents, arranged by a lawyer and encouraged by a therapist. The two couples lost their children that day and have since doggedly tried to process their pain. For Jay (Jason Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton), it brought them here, sitting with Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda (Ann Dowd), struggling with their loss as well, but also their responsibility for being the son the sniper.
After an opening stretch slightly hampered by Breeda Wool’s exaggerated attitude as a nervous woman who worked in the church the couples were headed to, the actor who became the debut director and screenwriter Fran Kranz locks us in with the quartet and doesn’t leave us out until they’re done. There is something admirable about his lack of interest in combating accusations of staginess, deciding against his characters to take brief excursions out of his only location (even to the bathroom) and refusing to use any form of flashback to visually illustrate the event that is taking place. being discussed. It is an airless chamber piece, a self-confident bet that pays off almost instantly thanks to the four impeccable performances at its center, each parent processing, intellectualizing and vocalizing his anguish in different ways.
The discussion is polite and delicately structured at first, influenced by advice from their respective therapists, but soon Jay and Gail’s burn assumes a desperate, though doomed, desire to know all the little details about the killer, to find some way to place the blame at your parents’ feet. How could they not know? What didn’t they notice? What could they have done differently? A lazier script would have turned Birney’s defensive father into yet another antagonist, perhaps a gun freak (Kranz skillfully overlooks the political debate at the beginning) or simply someone who is unwilling to accept the seriousness of what his son did. But what’s so sad and confusing about the mass is that everyone here is a victim, including the sniper himself, a boy intimidated with undiagnosed mental health problems and therefore the breathless burden of finding someone to be angry for. punishing, does not take anywhere; it will never be. Jay and Gail were armed, hoping for something more turbulent, perhaps, but what they find is even more sadness, two people who also lost their son, but whose pain will never be validated like theirs.
If it all sounds a bit torturous, then yes, sometimes it is, but the speed of Kranz’s dialogue and the foursome pathologization of the quartet make it an exciting, dark, but never overwhelming clock. It is anchored by four never-better actors, digging into their haunted characters, avoiding histrionics and, instead, showing us the constancy of mourning, always there, always hurting a little, rather than one that appears during a frantic explosion. Birney, an actor best known for his work on stage, and Dowd have the toughest roles, but both are able to convincingly convey the unfathomable conflict of still loving someone who did something so horrible (Dowd’s final moment in the film, a story she tells about her dead son, it’s a punch in the stomach).
Kranz, bizarrely better known as the junkie in Joss Whedon’s meta-horror, The Cabin in the Woods, made an impressively stimulating and unsentimental debut, a film of difficult questions that avoids easy answers. Mass may not be a particularly pleasant experience, but it is surprisingly effective.