Genre is mainly a tool of marketing, but there are exceptions. Mariama Diallo’s first feature, “Master,” which opens Friday in theatres and on Prime Video, has been widely described as a horror film, but what matters more is the kind of horrors it portrays. It’s set at the fictional Ancaster College, a highly selective school near Salem, Massachusetts. The film has supernatural elements, but its very subject, and the core of its power, is the display of real-world horrors—and the recognition that they’re often called “supernatural” because doing so is easier than facing reality. It’s so in movies as in life; much of the fantasy that dominates the current cinema is a form of concealment, a willful failure to look the world in the face. There’s a new vanguard of horror films by Black directors who’ve made sharply critical use of the genre—foremost, Jordan Peele, who in “Get Out” and “Us” leans into its artifices for their symbolic power. In “Master,” however, Diallo, who also wrote the script, deploys horror tropes to reveal hidden realities while also exposing the commonplace abuses of fantasy as useful self-deceptions and craven lies, in life and art alike.
The drama is centered on three of the very few Black women at the college: Gail Bishop (Regina Hall), a professor who is newly promoted to the dean-like position of master; Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), a first-year student whose move to campus is intercut with Gail’s; and Liv Beckman (Amber Gray), a junior faculty member who is up for tenure. The action, which takes place in the course of a single academic year, begins with Gail arriving to the campus house reserved for the master (it’s a residential job that involves close interaction with students), while Jasmine receives her room assignment from student volunteers. It turns out that her room is said to be haunted by the spirit of a local woman who, centuries ago, was hanged as a witch and who now, each year, takes a freshman to Hell. But the hell that Jasmine soon goes through has a much more proximate cause: her roommate, Amelia (Talia Ryder), who’s white, rich, stuck-up, and condescending.
From the start, Jasmine endures textbook microaggressions from Amelia and other white classmates, such as when there’s a spill on the floor and Amelia orders Jasmine to clean it, and when, at a party, a crowd of white students sing along loudly with a hip-hop song that uses the N-word. Returning to her dorm room, Jasmine finds her bed occupied by Amelia’s visiting friends; white classmates call Jasmine the names of such Black celebrities as the Williams sisters and Nicki Minaj. She also gets hassled by staff, including a white librarian who over-inspects her bag. The atmosphere on campus is heavy with racist static: Gail discovers a ceramic mammy doll in the master’s house, and also an archival photo of an august white family with a Black maid in the background. Jasmine takes note of the school’s Black cafeteria staff and their obsequious manner toward white students; flickering lights in a bathroom are part and parcel of an act of race-based harassment involving Jasmine’s hair. (She came to campus with a natural hairdo but then straightened her hair, seemingly to fit in with Amelia’s social set—but to no avail.)
The external ambience affects Jasmine’s state of mind. Diallo’s bold version of realism includes nightmares, hallucinations, and dire imaginings as primary phenomena and authentic events, and they drive Jasmine to dig into the microfilm at the library to research the history of her dorm room and its ostensible haunting. She discovers something altogether different from the well-worn legend: in 1965, the first Black student at Ancaster, a woman named Louisa Weeks, died there, by hanging. Diallo quickly shows what haunting means, when Jasmine exits the library, late at night, and—seen from on high—she looks up at those trees, those branches. The agonizing history of lynchings in America, and its newly intense and immediate place in the forefront of Jasmine’s thoughts and fears, are concentrated in a gesture and an image.
Among her new peers in the school’s administration, Gail gets similar treatment, and becomes unnerved by it. One colleague likens her to Barack Obama, and another tells her that she adds “flavor” to a party. Gail digs up more racist archival materials in the house, along with an infestation of maggots that manifests like a sign of secreted death. Ancaster’s race-centered tension does more than jangle the nerves of Black faculty and students—it sets them against one another. Jasmine endures harshly judgmental attention to her classwork by Liv, her English professor, who also makes inappropriate assumptions about Jasmine’s background. (Far from being poor and educationally disadvantaged, she’s a valedictorian from a suburb.) Even the overly friendly Black cafeteria server seems to look daggers at Jasmine. In Liv’s tenure review, white faculty put the onus of judgment on Gail, as if she bears special responsibility for vetting another Black candidate.
Soon, the aggressions that Jasmine is forced to tolerate become shockingly macro—racist, menacing. The story of Louisa Weeks becomes her ever-mounting obsession. The hostility and her increasing isolation send her into a state of mental torment and confusion. The seemingly metaphysical horrors that she faces at Ancaster become appallingly real—and Gail and Liv, far from being able to help, are held back by institutional rules and norms, by deep-rooted expectations and internalized inhibitions. For all its genre tropes, “Master” is a naturalistic view of American social life—a depiction of omnipresent racism and the practical devastation of Black lives that results from it. It’s a story of the real-world results of mainstream white America’s collective blind eye to racism and, in particular, the absurd and self-satisfied frivolity of addressing and deploring gross manifestations of racist aggression without acknowledging and reforming the racism—and the ignorance of it—that’s built into American institutions and drummed into American minds.
“Master” is a tensely effective, terrifyingly affecting drama that’s also a virtual vision of the power and the purpose of the modern right-wing war on truth. The distortion of American history that state governments are currently imposing on schools comes off as inseparable from the perpetuation and reinforcement of a system of white supremacy—not only by hiding the realities of racism but also by tangling victims in self-doubt and bewilderment. With its realistic psychological view and stark political diagnosis of ostensible spiritual mysteries, “Master” isn’t a horror film but a film of horrors that happen as a direct result of the suppression of history and the creation of myths that conceal and distort it. Diallo films with only tinges and tweaks of satirical derision; the mood is, rather, one of alarm. She uses perspective—from overhead, from below, from within, from oppressively close—to reveal inconvenient and painful truths, not least by breaking with familiar habits of cinematic vision. The film’s audacious tone and visual jolts are matched by dramatic twists that, in their strange disruptions of the narrative, mark irreparable damage to the world at large. Diallo’s use of extended takes has the feeling of eyes being held open to bear witness to enduring and silenced outrages.
