Master digs deep into its story of two women – both of them Black, and one the first Black woman to be fulfilling her respective role at a prestigious college in the northeastern United States – and finds a whole lot of horror and prejudice underneath the smiling surface of what that story appears to be. Horror and prejudice have cohabitated for such a long time in African American history, much of it sanitized or whitewashed for school districts wishing to remain “mainstream” (remember to read between the letters of that word), that it shouldn’t be a surprise to find out that not everything is hunky-dory within the walls of the university at the center of Mariama Diallo’s film (her debut as both writer and director).
The strain of history gone unexplored is of central concern to the story devised by Diallo, in ways that should not be revealed or even hinted at in a review. This is a movie that operates for a long time as a patient psychological thriller-cum-supernatural horror tale, and those pieces of the film are effective enough that dodging around the shock of the film’s final act is fairly easy. The two women are Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), a freshman at Ancaster College, and Gail Bishop (Regina Hall), the first Black master of a house at the college in its history. Ancaster, by the way, is located in or near Salem, Massachusetts – specifically, the spot where, many years ago, innocent women were the target of murderous paranoia about what witchcraft they may possess and practice.
Already, then, this setting is a loaded one, and then we move into the particulars of the plot. Gail has arrived to begin her tenure as master of the house of which Jasmine is now a part. Both are welcomed with polite bemusement that quickly becomes icy suspicion. For Gail, it comes from the school administrators and board, and even the sole other Black woman on staff at the college, English literature professor Liv Beckman (Amber Gray), distances herself from any conversation that might be confrontational in the wrong way. As an oxymoron of this, Liv shrugs off Jasmine’s questions about why she must write an essay examining Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter from a racial perspective.
The character of Liv and Gray’s curious performance in the role seem to be of secondary importance to this movie, which quickly establishes a supernatural mystery of sorts to be confronted by these characters. The ghost of a woman, who may or may not have been a real witch, haunts the grounds of Ancaster, and a smart decision on Diallo’s part is to shroud this aspect of the mystery within its own ambiguous existence, rather than bartering in the kind of mythmaking that curses the history of Salem’s witch-hunt trials to this day. Ancaster is a creepy place, thanks to the way Diallo and cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby capture the landscape in sun-dappled beauty during the daytime and acknowledge the shadowy corners that feel just a little too deep at night.
The movie initially follows Jasmine through the halls of the school, where her roommate (Talia Ryder) and others claim through empty smiles that they want to be her friend, and into the checkered past of the house itself, where a student (eventually revealed to be the first-ever Black student) died under suspicious and brutal circumstances. There is a lot more to those circumstances, as Jasmine and the administration ultimately and tragically learn the hard way, than such a vague description could suggest, but we won’t wade into spoiler territory here. After the plot turns more permanently toward Gail’s side of things, the mystery of the ghost and Liv’s strange behavior coalesce into the film’s final act.
At that point, surprises and shocks are in store, and even though Diallo doesn’t entirely succeed at merging the concerns of the school’s past and the story’s present, Master proves itself an ambitious and deeply felt fable about just how the unexplored history of our country has eked into the here and now. Part of that is due to Hall’s resolutely still and eventually weary performance. The other part is in how thoroughly the film’s director commits to an all-enveloping sort of darkness.
Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios
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