The devastating drama, by writer-director Fran Kranz, bridges the depressing familiarity and unthinkable grief of mass shootings in the US by focusing on the personal
It’s understandable if your first question of the movie Mass, set six years in the aftermath of a school shooting in the US, is: why watch? Why submerge oneself in the unimaginable grief of two families who lost their sons that day – one, Ray (Jason Isaacs) and Gail’s (Martha Plimpton), at the hands of the other, mourned only by his parents, Linda (Ann Dowd) and Richard (Reed Birney).
Mass, written and directed by actor Fran Kranz, takes on the delicate and daunting task of bridging the depressingly familiar and the completely unthinkable. There is so much that has been said about the complete insanity of routine mass shootings in the US – the grief, frustration, bitterness of families, the cliched reactions of everyone else, necessarily laundered and recycled: “No Way To Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” as the Onion headline that has run 18 times since 2014 says. It is also impossible to fully capture the truly unfathomable grief of being on the other side of the numbing headlines.