Mass, about the meeting of two sets of parents after a
school shooting, joins classics including Rope and My Dinner With Andre that thrive within the confines of a single set
“Stagey” is a term generally used as a slight against a film, evoking that stiff, musty sense of confinement so particular to a bad play. But it doesn’t have to be. Some films use the restrictions of theatre – a small cast, a single location – to match on camera the intensity and intimacy of live performance, fused with the very screen-specific benefits of the closeup.
American Actor turned director Fran Kranz’s impressive debut feature, Mass (now streaming on Sky Cinema), is one such film. Set entirely within a suburban Episcopal church, and mostly within the four walls of a bland function room, it is stagey in the tensest, tautest sense.
The setup is simple and wrenching: the church hall has been chosen as a neutral space for peace talks of a kind, between two sets of parents who are at once strangers to each other and inextricably connected by the tragedy of a school
shooting – that most increasingly, queasily familiar of American atrocities. Depending on your point of view, there’s either much to be said here or nothing at all: eventually, they opt for the former, talking through waves and counter-waves of grief, guilt and white-hot anger.