‘Mass': Chamber Piece Deals With School Shooting Aftermath in Stagey Fashion [Review]

Review originally posted at Sundance 2021. “Mass” hits theatres next Friday.

The risk of making a single-location drama, or otherwise known as a “chamber piece,” is risky in that it could suck the cinematic out of a film. The staginess that occurs when you attempt such a film can be seen as downright theatrical, a screenplay actually fit for the stage rather than the screen. 

Take, for example, actor-turned-director Fran Kranz’s “Mass,” which has four people sitting in a church anteroom and discussing a tragedy that connects them. “Mass” is so anti-cinematic, a sobering confessional set in a reverenced yet monotonous setting. It features four great performances, a downer of a topic and about a half dozen powerful monologues from its actors.

The film is set inside an Episcopal church, in a bland, all-white room in the basement, where a mysterious meeting soon take place. The church organizer meets with the mediator of the meeting, who frets over the smallest details: food or no food? Is the table well-positioned? Will the decorations of the windows trigger an emotional response? There’s a protective bubble being built here and, if you go into “Mass” having not read its synopsis beforehand, then the first 15-20 minutes may play out as rather puzzling.

It’s only when the two undistinguished couples arrive and are seated in the isolated room that you start to gather up the clues and realize whatever it is they’ve come to talk about. There is unsettled pain in the air; no one is ready to break the ice and talk about the elephant in the room. However, slowly, but surely we come to understand that Gail and Jay (Martha Plimpton and Jason Isaacs) lost their son in a school shooting. The shooter was the son of Richard and Linda (Reed Birney and Ann Dowd). It is hinted that both couples have had a history of litigation due to the tragedy, but this meeting is a chance to make amends and let bygones be bygones. But old wounds never heal. Compromise is the only option.

And so, “Mass” launches, an emotionally draining film, filled with an endless amount of close-ups. Agendas start to unfurl, grudges are unearthed, resentments are exposed, and so on. It’s a difficult film to ignore, absorbingly in the issues it raises about mental health and gun control. You come to realize that our four protagonists have been re-living that tragic day, every day, for six years, obsessively, a minute-by-minute knowledge of what happened that day. It haunts them to the point of sickness. 

Jay, who has become a gun control advocate, can’t help but try ever so hard, looking for answers that can never be found. It’s that craving that we all have as humans to demand an explanation for the unexplainable. He questions Linda and Richard’s parenting. Their son had trouble adjusting to high school, getting bullied in the process, with innumerable bouts of therapy, but as Linda so eloquently says “The truth is, we believed we were good parents,” she confesses, “and in some awful, disturbing way, we still do.” 

Either you go with the sincerity Linda conveys or you don’t, and Franz, who was inspired by the Parkland shooting when he wrote the script, means to make her intentions as ambiguous as possible, without any exposition for his characters. His bland aesthetic (there are also plenty of static shots here) means to focus less on style and more on the issues at play here. 

Without any background knowledge of the film prior to watching it, I was entirely convinced that this was based on a play. The stagey nature of “Mass” is more stage than cinema. Kranz himself seems to wonder about the identity of his film at times, suddenly cutting away from the church room conversation and suddenly relaying his camera to barren highways of the mysterious Midwestern town the film is set in. As if to switch gears for a bit, knowing all too well how suffocating and stylishly empty his film can feel at its most excruciating moments.

SCORE: B-/C+