Mass (dir. Fran Kranz), 2021

There are great acting performances in Mass, but at what cost? A two hour slog about the parents of a school shooting victim and those of the perpetrator having an unhealthy and ill-advised sit down. Rest assured, their discussion is not the entirety of these two hours. The audience instead is blessed with the asinine build-up of a church volunteer/employee setting up the room. This human plot device bounces her red-bob around the church as she sets up a table and chairs and places a spread of bagels and coffee amidst piano lessons keying along. She is overly obsessed with curating the perfect trauma room, upset when the social worker arrives and shifts chairs around and requests tissues be more prominently placed without being obvious. Their back-and-forth dialogue is nothing more than exposition and a failed attempt to force an eerie build-up, assuming the audience has entered blind and are not aware why these two couples will meet. There must be an Idiot’s Guide to Cinematic Buildup writer/director Fran Kranz skimmed over while typing out the first 20 and last 10 pages of script.

Jay and Gail, whose son was shot in the neck and bled out during a school shooting, have requested to meet Linda and Richard, the perpetrators' parents. The social worker we met, and spent far too much time with earlier, appears to work with Linda and Richard to provide closure to victims' families. On the advice of a therapist, who should have their credentials stripped and alma maters disaccredited, Jay and Gail have finally decided to reach out after six years. The ensemble of actors playing the parents are the saving grace of the film and prevent it from completely wading into the Lifetime Movie Network waters. That all said, even with worthy attempts at humanization, the dialogue and all the twists, turns, rises, and falls result in these sympathetic characters becoming nothing more than plot devices themselves. As you can imagine, once Kranz offers some emotionally manipulative scenes of the parents sharing childhood photographs of victim and murderer, the meeting quickly descends to a game of blame. Jay and Gail are desperate to know how Linda and Richard could not have noticed the warning signs of their son's deteriorating mental state, his unchecked rage, and lack of friends. Perhaps the most glaring issue behind Mass is the concept. What will Jay and Gail receive out of this meeting? The couple make a very loud point they never engaged in lawsuits as it would never bring their son back. So, what would sitting with the parents of their son’s murderer do exactly? The easy answer is to provide forgiveness, perhaps humanize their enemies, and Kranz does not have the depth to go for something deeper or more difficult in scale. Nor does Kranz have the talent as a screenwriter to arrive at even the easy answer with any believability.

At the end we are graced with the insufferable church volunteer, who again serves her role as human plot device. While the couples separate, and this volunteer laments that she did not meet Linda and Richard before they departed to introduce herself (why we will never know), she searches with great rigor for a box to place a small vase of flowers so Jay and Gail can safely transport them home. Why can they not just carry the vase and why is there such debate over which box to provide and whether newspaper or bubble wrap is more appropriate? Perhaps this stalling technique was in Chapter 1 of Idiot’s Guide to Cinematic Buildup. Linda returns to share one last story of her son, a forced monologue (with no disrespect to Ann Dowd). Much like the film’s beginning, it’s end is insanely long and teetering with little pay off. All films are emotionally manipulative at heart, that is the beauty of film and the emotions they inspire. However, Mass is emotionally hollow in it’s manipulation, serving more as an actor’s showcase than a worthy story to tell.

Rating: 4/10