[imagesource: Mass / The Telegraph]

Focused on the parents of a murdered schoolboy sitting down with the parents of his teenage killer, Mass is overflowing with astonishingly raw and nuanced emotion.

The well-crafted indie film starts to feel like less of a performance and more like an urgent and necessary conversation that people are having (should be having) in real-time.

Per their therapist’s suggestion, Gail (Martha Plimpton from The Goonies) and her husband Jay (Jason Isaacs from Harry Potter) arrange a meeting with their son’s killer’s parents, Linda (Ann Dowd from The Handmaid’s Tale) and Richard (Reed Birney from House Of Cards).

Here’s The Telegraph with more from their five-star review:

Six years earlier, their teenager, Hayden, took a gun into school and killed Evan, the last of 10 pupils he randomly targeted, before retreating into the library and killing himself.

The writer-director, Fran Kranz, started to conceive this shattering dramatic workout as a shell-shocked response to the Parkland massacre in Florida.

We see not one glimpse of the calamity that’s blighted these lives, but in the eyes and faces of the four actors, we see it all.

Already, with just the trailer, and without being in a hotbed of school shootings, your heart breaks into pieces.

Take it in:

“From triggering pictures of Evan’s childhood through testy disputes about Hayden’s psychiatric status,” the audience watches each micro-expression of grief, shame, blame, and guilt flicker over each face as the character’s fissures widen and deepen.

In that sense, the quartet misses no opportunity “to do some of their very best work here”. Dowd’s Linda is lauded as “phenomenal”.

Besides the captivating cast, the film is also five-star worthy for not “calcifying into a hot-button gun debate”:

Mass is very much, instead, about the conscious push it takes to let go and forgive. The guilt and horror of the culprit’s family, plus their absolute pariahdom, make them even more pitiable in some ways than the parents of the victim. No one counts the 11th corpse.

Although we learn revenge is the lesser road to take, the film is honest enough to grapple with the temptation of it.

The film teaches us that “awkward compassion” is not the least path to resistance but certainly the best path to healing.

You can watch Mass here.

[source:telegraph]