Mass (2021)
(On Cable TV, June 2022) If I had stopped watching Mass half an hour in, I would have hated it. Even forty-five minutes in, I wasn’t all that convinced that I’d like it. It is, after all, a film whose early moments are designed to make you uncomfortable. There’s meaningless chatter between people working in a church about organizing some kind of very touchy meeting between the two parties. Everyone is terrified of doing something wrong, and the rhythm of the film pauses on every single awkward moment. After a while, we meet our two parties – two middle-aged couples—and lock ourselves in the small meeting room in which most of the subsequent drama will take place. I would normally stop with the plot, but here’s the added touch that brings us to the crux of the film: One couple had their son die in a school shooting, and the other couple were the parents of the (deceased) shooter. To say that the two couples are uncomfortable with each other is an incredible understatement – there’s this sense that the film is constantly a moment or a careless remark away from one person strangling another. Much of Mass, once past the prologue, is strictly a theatrical performance taking place in near-real time, with the four people trying to understand each other and their kids’ actions. Credible personalities emerge from the dialogue, with a number of set-pieces enlivening a film purely based on dialogue (challenged for not knowing the details of their son’s death, the father of the shooter rattles off the names of every single victim and how they died). Writer-director Fran Kranz’s Mass remains a deeply troubling and uncomfortable film – no one will be blamed for heading for the exits at the earliest opportunity. But it eventually becomes quite effective at what it tries to do, and even ends on a note of… something better by the end of the film, once truths spill out and characters understand each other. I despise that school shootings are common enough that this film is in any way “relatable” (and I write this as the news relays details of another school shooting that will change absolutely nothing in the American psychopathy of gun ownership) but Mass doesn’t feel exploitative or sensational – it eventually puts everything together into an intense, claustrophobic drama that doesn’t get to blink or cut away from the tension building between its characters. Give it a chance to get over the initial hump, and the result may surprise you.
