AThe center of the agonizing Mass drama is a conversation with overwhelming difficulties, like the one that makes you stiffen and even think about how he might play. Following him for almost two hours is then a test of endurance, an often suffocating experience caught in a room with four people who do not want to be there, but know that they should, led by the vain hope that may be you may get rid of some of the paralyzing pain with which everyone is stuck. He goes deeper into the darkness to try to see the light, asking hard questions knowing that the answers will be even harder, a gloomy but necessary torture chamber.
It takes place six years after a devastating family tragedy: a high school shooting. A room in a church is prepared for a meeting between two sets of parents arranged by a lawyer and encouraged by a therapist. Both couples lost their sons that day and have stubbornly tried to process their pain ever since. For Jay (Jason Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton) who led them here, sitting down with Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda (Ann Dowd), struggling with their loss as well as their responsibility for their son he was the one who shot.
After an opening stretch slightly damaged by an excessive return from Breeda Wool, while a nervous woman working at the church to which the couple is heading, the actor who first became writer-director Fran Kranz locks us in with the four and don’t let us out until we arrive. There is something admirable about his lack of interest in fighting the allegations of domination, deciding against his characters to make short trips from his location (even to the toilet) and refusing to use any form of flashback to visually illustrate the event in question. . It is a piece of airless room, a self-confident game, which pays off almost instantly thanks to the four impeccable shows in its center, each parent processing, intellectualizing and vocalizing anxiety in different ways.
Their discussion is polite and delicate structured at first, influenced by the advice of the respective therapists, but soon Jay and Gail’s burning takes over, the desperate desire, if condemned, to know every little detail about the killer, to find a way to give further guilt. at the feet of his parents. How could he not know? What didn’t they take? What could he have done differently? A more lazy scenario would have turned Birney’s defensive father into an antagonist, probably a gun (Kranz slips smartly into the political debate from the beginning) or simply someone who doesn’t want to accept the seriousness of what happened. made his son. But what is so sad and messy at the table is that everyone here is a victim, including the shooter himself, an assaulted boy with undiagnosed mental health issues, and thus the breathless accusation of finding someone to be upset about. , to punish him, does not lead anywhere; he will never do it. Jay and Gail were armed, expecting something more turbulent, but what they find is even more sadness, two people who have lost their son, but whose pain will never be validated as it was theirs.
If everything sounds quite torturous, yes, sometimes it’s just the speed of Kranz’s dialogue and the nodular, stone-free pathology of the quartet make it a captivating, gloomy, but never so oppressive watch. It is anchored by four never better actors, digging into their haunted characters, avoiding histrionics and showing us instead the constancy of pain, always there, always hurting somewhat, rather than one that occurs during a frantic outburst. Birney, an actor best known for his stage work, and Dowd have more difficult roles to play, but both are able to convincingly convey the incomprehensible conflict of still loving someone who did something so horrible (last minute of Dowd in the film, a story she tells about her dead son, is a gut punch).
Kranz, bizarrely best known as the stoner in Joss Whedon’s meta-horror The Cabin in the Woods, has made an impressive, sentimental debut, a film with difficult questions that avoids easy answers. The meal may not be a particularly pleasant experience, but it is extremely effective.