College and university campuses have proven fertile ground for horror movies. Facing threats both supernatural and blisteringly realistic, the characters in these movies are at a defining crossroads in their life and must suddenly face down a rising evil. That evil could be a murderer lurking in a sorority house, as is the case in Black Christmas (1974), or a noxious time loop forcing you to live out your death, again and again, like the crux of Happy Death Day (2017). Even so, the genre has often skewed towards slashers and camp, and while I love Scream 2 (1997) as much as the next horror nerd, it’s undeniably exciting to find a film that repurposes the setting for an unsettling tale rippling with originality. Such is the case with Mariama Diallo’s Master (2022), a college-set chiller oozing with cinematic personality.
Synopsis
Set at fictional Ancaster College, located somewhere in New England, Master centers on the parallel experiences of two Black women at a predominantly white institution. Gail Bishop (Regina Hall) is a professor, and the first Black woman to serve as “Master” of a hallowed residence hall on campus. Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee) is a newly arrived first-year who moves into a dorm room under Bishop’s watch. The first major catch is that Moore’s peers swear her room is “haunted,” plagued by the vengeful spirit of a witch who was hung near campus centuries earlier. While no one gives Bishop a similar warning, she gradually discovers that there may be something wicked lurking in the shadowed corners of her new house. Master weaves these two women’s tales together to examine the malevolence possible at Ancaster.
Overlapping Horrors
Diallo’s script is a magnificent blend of tones. The dominant tenor is terror, but doled out in a pronged approach. There are the gothic and witchy flourishes that set that corner of horror, what with scenes and sequences focused on lurking and hooded figures, or unsettling stories of spirits arriving at 3:33 a.m. However, that only makes up half the frightfulness. Diallo matches the otherworldly with the painfully grounded stream of micro-aggressions, blatant racist acts, and performative grandstanding from white characters, all of which add up to make Ancaster a venomous place for Bishop and Moore even without the possibility of a vicious witch. The pair of streams feed one another as Master progresses, breaking the barriers between the two until they amount to one cruel assault of hatred.
Layered over top of this is a scorching vein of satire, one that should send anyone who sees even a glimmer of themselves in the ignorant white characters diving fully into self-reflection and education. Diallo feeds the faculty around Bishop and the students around Moore a persistent array of socio-cultural illiteracies that manifest in statements and actions reveal the performative nature of their biases masquerading as allies. In a similar fashion to how Gillian Flynn skewered marriage through the bleakest of satires in Gone Girl, Diallo eviscerates liberal, white, bad faith, “but I have a Black best friend” absurdity. It is not laugh-out-loud satire. No, it is instead a delicious deployment of cringe that forces the audience to face the damaging nature of the character’s actions without the ability to look away or write it off as harmless.
Beyond announcing her as a formidable writer, Master should also emerge as Diallo’s calling card for her prodigious aesthetic sensibilities. Master marks Diallo’s first feature-length directorial credit, but all of the talent she showed off in her previous short films explodes with exuberance here. In conveying the dread closing in on Bishop and Moore, Diallo often opts for a gradually creeping camera, one that tracks or zooms in on her characters. Elsewhere, an unsettling and roving POV often places the audience in the viewpoint of an undefined voyeur, simply observing as the two women experience horror after horror. Diallo also displays a brilliant understanding of the power of lighting design in horror. Bishop’s house is all manner of earthy darkness of the gothic variety, and the fluorescent red and yellow lights of Moore’s residence hall are downright terrifying. Add in a series of perfectly-placed shadowy outlines of the Nosferatu (1922) variety, and you end up with a visually staggering work of horror.
Blistering Performances
Populating all of these arenas are two shattering performances from Hall and Renee. Taken as a pairing, their work speaks to two points on a similar journey. Renee’s Moore is taking her first steps into the exacting realm of being Black in academia, while Hall’s Bishop is on the end of having “endured” to reach a prominent and powerful position rarely granted to a Black woman. Both actresses channel a devastating level of anguish into their work, relaying the toll that the unceasing battery of horrors around them takes on their mental and physical health. Hall, in particular, conveys a constant sense of simmering rage underneath a veneer of equanimity. She is masterful in how she dolls out glimpses of the rawness underneath, more and more emerging the deeper we descend into Ancaster’s torment. Renee occupies the space of promising youth and charm demolished by a toxic environment. It is heartbreaking acting, and impossible to look away from.
Conclusion
Master is precisely the sort of horror movie I hold out hope for every year. It is a movie by a director I previously knew little about but causes me to fall deeply in love with their style because they use a genre I care about to deliver visceral filmmaking I will not soon forget. Put that alongside searing performances from a slew of great performers and Master truly emerges as a strong early contender for the most memorable horror film of the year.
Master premieres March 18, 2022 in select theaters and on Prime Video following its showing at SXSW.
Master was viewed in the Festival Favorites section of SXSW 2022.
Director: Mariama Diallo
Writer: Mariama Diallo
Rated: R
Runtime: 98m
Rating: 5 out of 5
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Devin McGrath-Conwell holds a B.A. in Film / English from Middlebury College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College. His obsessions include all things horror, David Lynch, the darkest of satires, and Billy Joel. Devin’s writing has also appeared in publications such as Filmhounds Magazine, Film Cred, Horror Homeroom, and Cinema Scholars.
