Two sets of parents, Jay (Jacob Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton), and Linda (Ann Dowd) and Richard (Reed Birney), meet six years after a tragedy that forever changed their lives. A swirling character-focused chamber piece about responsibility, guilt, grief, parenting, and forgiveness, Mass is an incredibly difficult weepy that honestly confronts challenging material. To go into the specifics of those details is to deny the reader of the hard-fought suspense that the filmmaker works to achieve so do try to go into this as blind as you can.

Evocatively-written and captured with stripped-down humanistic intimacy by first time writer-director Fran Kranz (probably best remembered as the stoner for Cabin in the Woods), Mass is a treatise on the-most-difficult conversations led by four towering performances. An unshakeable cinematic experience, Katz hosts a lecture of exhaustive and exhausting conversations that result in moments of quiet defeat, explosive anguish, or wrathful finger-pointing. At its core, Mass is a deconstruction of love and hate and finding the power within to if not turn tragedy into meaning, to come to terms with accepting one’s pain rather than letting it consume you.

Sure to leave audiences shaken and emotionally-drained, Mass examines how pain manifests itself and, when left unchecked, explodes. As a sociological curiosity, it’s a distinctly American film with a distinctly American voice. As people confront the aftermath of horrific tragedy and its infinite ripples through a community, Mass voices concerns that are certainly (and tragically) not unfamiliar in the country. The question becomes: is Kranz only preaching to the choir?

When actors shift their focus to a directorial capacity, they usually put performances center stage and Kranz does so forcefully; creating the emotionally space for his performers to all give complex, lively, awards-worthy turns. Dowd and Isaacs are particularly compelling, the later of which has far too long been undervalued as a towering dramatic force. But so too is Kranz’ pen sharp, his voice electrifyingly cutting and wholly honest.

In many ways, Mass feels like it could have been a play – and a very good one at that – but there is nonetheless a lot of value add in Kranz’ filmmaking, which transports viewers into a realm of voyeuristic intimacy usually reserved for that other medium. Economical and laser-focused on character and performance, Mass pinpoints where audiences brush against discomfort and settles there. The desire to avoid the difficult discussion that brought these two families to an impasse is palpable. The pregnancy of the pauses sink in deep. The belabored breaths that punctuate the still, silent, stuffy Episcopalian church room where they’ve agree to congregate mirror our own sob-stuttered gasps. For 110 vital minutes, we’re stuck in that room, privy to these family’s most intimate feelings and emotions, their regrets and their moments of pride, their capacity for healing and being healed. It’s a hell of a watch. Strap in.

CONCLUSION: A painstakingly intimate, conversation-driven drama with phenomenal performances all around (Jacob Isaacs and Ann Dowd are especially extraordinary), Mass is a terrific and terrifically depressing debut from Fran Kranz that will be sure to move audiences to tears.