AThe centerpiece of the painful drama Mis is a conversation with overwhelming problems, the kind that makes you hesitate to even think about how it can play out. Seeing it unfold for almost two hours is then something of an endurance test, an often suffocating experience trapped in a room with four people who do not want to be there but know they have to, driven by the vain hope that can be it may disappear with some of the crippling pain with which they are all stuck. It goes deeper into the dark to try to see the light, and asks difficult questions knowing that the answers will be even more difficult, a grim yet necessary torture chamber.
It takes place six years after a devastatingly famous 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 since tried with sadness to process their grief. For Jay (Jason Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton) who led them here, sat down with Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda (Ann Dowd), and also struggled with their loss, but also their responsibility for it was their son who the shooter was.
After an opening that was slightly disfigured by an excessive twist by Breeda Wool as a nervous woman working at the church where the couple is heading, the actor, first time director, director Fran Kranz, joins us with the quartet and do not let us out until they are through. There is something admirable in his lack of interest in fighting accusations of spreading, deciding against his characters to take any short outings from his place (even to the toilet) and refusing to use any form of flashback to the event that discussed, visually illustrate. It’s an airless room piece, a confident gamble that bears fruit almost immediately, thanks to the four impeccable performances at the center, which each parent processes their anxiety in different ways.
Their discussion is initially polite and delicately structured, influenced by advice from their respective therapists, but soon the burn of Jay and Gail prevails, a desperate, if doomed, desire to know every little detail of the killer, to a finding way to place further guilt at his parents ’feet. How could they not have known? What did they not pick up on? What could they have done differently? A diaper text would have made Birney’s defensive father more of an antagonist, perhaps a gun nut (Kranz slips past political debate early on) or simply someone who did not want to accept the seriousness of his son. But what’s so sad and messy about the mist is that everyone here is a victim, including the shooter himself, a bullied boy with undiagnosed mental health problems, and the outrageous charge of finding someone who could get angry, to punish, does not lead anywhere; it never will. Jay and Gail were armed, and perhaps expecting something broken, but what they find is still sad, two people who also lost their son, but whose grief will never be confirmed as it was.
If this all sounds rather torturous, then at times it’s just the speed of Kranz’s dialogue and the quartet’s clumsy, non-stone untouched pathology that makes it a gripping watch, gloomy but never oppressive. It is anchored by four actors who are never better, they dig into their haunted characters, avoid histrionics and show us the persistence of sadness, always there, always hurting, rather than one that emerges during a mad outburst. Birney, an actor best known for his stage work, and Dowd have the more difficult roles to perform, but both can convincingly convey the unfathomable conflict of loving someone who did something so awful (Dowd’s last moment in the film, a story she tells about her dead son is a gut blow).
Kranz, bizarrely best known as the stoner in Joss Whedon’s meta-horror The Cabin in the Woods, unveiled an impressive debut without sentimentality, a film with difficult questions that avoids easy answers. Mass may not be a very pleasant experience, but it is remarkably effective.