Mark Reviews Movies: MASTER (2022)

Master, Amazon Studios

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | March 17, 2022

On the surface, Master is a horror story about a curse on a college campus, involving an accused witch of centuries past, some Salem-style injustice, and future students who appear to fall victim to some kind of dark magic. It's never really what's on the surface, though, or at least that's what a pair of Black women already know or come to learn over the course of a semester at this predominantly white institution of learning.

Writer/director Mariama Diallo's feature debut is particularly smart in the way it plays two possibilities at once. The first is what we see and the official story we learn about this place and its history, as well as the people who run it now and the stated goals of trying to move beyond the college's past failures and oversights. It's a pat, easy-to-digest narrative of terrible things that no longer occur and of supernatural terrors that remove the human element from any discomfort, fear, or violence that may come. If it sounds unrealistic, well, that's the truth—but only part of it.

The college's own official narrative is just as simple, too. Yes, the place was started by and has since been run by, as well as primarily occupied by, a bunch of white people, but today's institution is different. "Diversity" and "inclusion" are the words some students and faculty members, clearly selected for their race and/or ethnicity, say during a promotional video for the college. It's predictable but still jarring when the ad cuts to the school's president, who looks a lot like all of former powerful people of the school, whose painted portraits and marble busts are scattered all over campus.

It would be false to say that this college hasn't changed over its centuries of existence. What, really, does that change amount to, though, when, in the present day, the number of Black students is less than two dozen and the staff makes a huge deal out of finally having its first Black master of house in the school's history?

That's one of the many questions put forth by Diallo's film, which have to be confronted on account of the film's second—but definitely not secondary—possibility and perspective. It's seen through the eyes of Gail Bishop (Regina Hall, in a still and resolute performance that makes its later devastated and disillusioned turn all the more potent), that first Black master of a house, and freshman Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), whose first day on campus is met with suspicious looks from the all-white student welcoming committee.

They chalk up that surprise to the fact that Jasmine's dorm room is the one of urban legend. It's the place where, several decades ago, a student was haunted by visions of the witch, until she lost her mind and was found hanging in the room. What those students don't mention to Jasmine is that the student who died was a young Black woman—another first, just like Gail.

Maybe there's something else to it, just as there is, perhaps, something else to those looks Jasmine receives when she arrives on campus—and just as there's potentially something underneath the torment Jasmine gets from the witch or the "witch," which includes carved-in-wood demands to leave and a burning cross. Which view of reality should we believe: the one that everyone at this place says to be true or the one that we can sense beneath that official narrative?

The story here moves between Gail and Jasmine. Gail maneuvers politics of the school, tries to help Jasmine through some personal and educational hurdles, and starts uncovering the past of the on-campus house where she now resides. Meanwhile, Jasmine makes friends with her roommate (played by Talia Ryder) and other young white women (who quickly reveal they might not be real friends, given some passive-aggressive statements and notes), has some issues with Gail's friend Liv Beckman (Amber Gray) and that professor's strange attempt to critically analyze The Scarlet Letter through a racial lens, and deals with all of those seemingly otherworldly nightmares and visions of the witch coming for her.

To be clear, this is only a horror tale on the surface, although Diallo does create an eerie atmosphere within the narrow spaces of Gail's haunted-by-the-past house (where bells and other things in the attic suggest servitude or worse), the darkened shelves of the library (where the librarian makes a particular effort to search Jasmine when the alarm sounds), and the nighttime grounds and dorm room halls (where a figure in a black cloak stalks and harasses our freshman protagonist). The parentheticals within those events and places suggest some past or currently hidden truth that remains unspoken for the most part, because Diallo knows that such matters exist and persist between the lines of a place with as much history and as progressive a façade as this college.

Master chips away at that exterior, often with creepy imagery (the deathly faces of the portraits of college luminaries, which only Jasmine seems to notice) but also with some humor (the increasingly suspicious professor and that promotional video). The result is quietly scathing and ultimately mysterious. Diallo seems to put all of the pieces in place for an answer, but since the real point is to raise questions that haven't been properly resolved since the time of this college's founding ("It's America," Gail notes, in case one misses the metaphor here), it's not as if we actually expect some simple solution. Those questions haunt.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products