Mass 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 sets of parents arranged by a lawyer and encouraged by a therapist. Both couples lost their sons that day and have been doggedly trying to process their grief ever since. For Jay (Jason Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton) that’s led them here, sitting down with Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda (Ann Dowd), struggling with their loss too but also their responsibility for it was their son who was the shooter.

After an opening stretch slightly marred by an over-mannered turn from Breeda Wool as a nervy woman working at the church the couples are heading to, actor turned first-time writer-director Fran Kranz locks us in with the foursome and doesn’t let us out until they’re through. There’s something admirable in his lack of interest in combatting accusations of staginess, deciding against his characters taking any brief excursions out of his one location and refusing to use any form of flashback to visually illustrate the event being discussed. It’s an airless chamber piece, a self-assured gamble that pays off almost instantaneously thanks to the four impeccable performances at its centre, each parent processing, intellectualising and vocalising their anguish in different ways.

Their discussion is polite and delicately structured at first, influenced by advice from their respective therapists but soon Jay and Gail’s burn takes over, a desperate, if doomed, desire to know every small detail about the killer, to find some way of placing further blame at his parents’ feet. A lazier script would have turned Birney’s defensive dad into more of an antagonist, a gun nut perhaps or simply someone unwilling to accept the gravity of what his son has done. But what’s so sad and messy about Mass is that everyone here is a victim, including the shooter himself, a bullied boy with undiagnosed mental health issues, and so the breathless charge to find someone to be angry at, to punish, doesn’t lead anywhere; it never will. Jay and Gail were armed, expecting something more fractious perhaps but what they find is yet more sadness, two people who have also lost their son but whose grief will never be validated in the way theirs has been. Mass may not be a particularly enjoyable experience but it’s a strikingly effective one.

– Compilation