Writer-director Mariama Diallo’s Master is a supernatural horror film that’s also a compendium of observations on racist institutional norms in higher ed. It certainly scores some points on the soft targets of liberal academia, but it never manages to turn its often trenchant social critique into a compelling, or even coherent, narrative.
Set at the fictional Ancaster College, a New England liberal arts school that’s so exclusive that even Franklin D. Roosevelt reputedly couldn’t get in, the film juxtaposes the stories of two Black women at opposite ends of their academic careers. Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee) is a naïve freshman assigned to a dorm room that campus lore holds to be haunted by the ghost of Margaret Millett, an alleged witch burned at the stake centuries ago. Meanwhile, Gail Bishop (Regina Hall), a well-respected professor who’s just been named as the college’s first Black master, is struggling to maintain her sense of identity while assisting a university rooted in racist exclusion to burnish its image as an inclusive place of learning.
In their own ways, these two women are forced to decide whether the price of gaining access to traditionally white corridors of power is even worth the trouble. Master ponders whether it’s possible for Black women to convince the gatekeepers of a racist institution to let them in without losing a piece of themselves. It’s a valid and inherently dramatic question, one that’s intimately connected to the specifics of the individual characters, but the film continually buries it under a pile of arbitrary scares, easy satire, and plot threads that lead nowhere.
Diallo attempts to shoehorn social commentary on so many hot-button campus issues—from sexual assault to Rachel Dolezal-style hucksterism to faux-woke diversity PR—that she leaves for herself little time to develop Jasmine and Gail as people. The film defines them largely in contradistinction to one of the few other Black faculty members at Ancaster: Liv Beckman (Amber Gray), a light-skinned English professor who gives Jasmine an F for failing to embrace a critical race reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter while buttering up Gail to convince a nearly all-white panel to grant her tenure. Gail and Jasmine, Master suggests, are dogged, hard workers, while Liv wields race cynically and opportunistically.
Beyond their relative work ethics, though, Jasmine and Gail largely remain ciphers. There are moments when Diallo’s film seems as if it’s going to deepen these characters, as in a scene in which Jasmine drafts an email to her parents lying that everything at school is just peachy. But these strands are oddly dropped almost as soon as they’re raised.
As her difficulties fitting in at Ancaster grow, Jasmine becomes increasingly haunted by nightmares of Margaret Millet’s ghost, which becomes a heavy-handed metaphor for the college’s racism as well as Jasmine’s propensity to run from her identity rather than embrace it. But Jasmine’s background, her motivation, and her desires are all far too vaguely drawn for this metaphorical demon to have much impact. It doesn’t help that Diallo’s handling of the film’s horror elements is a clunky mix of generic scares, conspicuous Shining-style slow zooms, and over-the-top lighting that inexplicably makes a normal dorm room hallway look like the boiler room from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
As a Black-made horror film with an eye toward a social critique of white liberalism, Master naturally invites comparison to Get Out. But if Jordan Peele’s film was able to get away with some relatively thin and caricatured characters, that’s thanks to the air-tight construction of its central metaphor, as well as its full-on commitment to the gonzo reality of its premise. By contrast, Master is a frustratingly diffuse work, one that never seems to fully buy into its own horror trappings and ends up treating its characters as mere avatars of Diallo’s grievances. However righteous the film’s targeting of injustice in white-dominated institutions like academia may be, it’s simply not enough, by itself, to sustain a work of fiction.
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