Anger turns to tears

In this age of CGI action-movies it takes courage to set a film almost wholly within one room and use the dialogue between four actors to carry the weight of the plot and drama of the piece.

But that is just what Fran Kranz has bravely done to absorbing effect in his debut feature Mass, creating a film that is both heartbreaking and hopeful, and (to my eyes) deeply Christian.

The opening shot is of an Episcopalian church surrounded by the barren hills of a Mid-West winter. A nervous church-worker prepares a downstairs room for a meeting, setting out four chairs and a table, a crucifix on the plain wall behind. Two sets of parents arrive. Both have lost sons in a high-school mass shooting (giving at least half the meaning of the film’s title) six years before. The difference is that one of the couple’s sons was murdered whilst the other was the murderer. What follows is an intense emotional drama in which our sympathies are pulled back and forth between the couples as they search for answers and healing to the agony of their loss.