"Master" movie poster
In Master’s opening scene, Jasmine arrives at Ancaster College expecting to find challenging classes and new friends. But from the first moment, something’s not right. One of the student greeters on the campus lawn exclaims to her cohort in a loud whisper, “Guys, she’s got the room!”
Soon enough, Jasmine (Zoe Rennee), one of only eight Black students at the Ivy League school, hears the half-believed legend associated with her dorm room, No. 302. Ancaster, and especially Room 302, was cursed in the 1600s by a witch executed nearby. Students have jumped from its window—usually at 3:33 a.m. …
Across campus, Gail Bishop (Regina Hall), the first Black master of one of Ancaster’s houses, experiences eerie moments as she moves into her official mansion—especially in the room at the top of the backstairs where servants once lived. Gail finds photographs from years ago, including a servant who stares back at her like a mirror image. There are plagues of maggots—and a cookie jar in the form of a black servant woman pushed to the back of a kitchen cupboard.
In her feature film debut, writer-director Mariama Diallo follows the lead of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, dressing up African American exclusion as a horror genre picture and moving the uncanny action to the sort of prestigious university where presidents and senators are groomed. Electric lights flicker and ominous bass notes are sounded when things are about to get weird. Jasmine suffers from nightmares of shadowy stalkers—are they real or metaphors for the restless ghosts of racism that haunt Ancaster and America? The ghosts grow noisier—and tangible—when someone carves LEAVE on Jasmine’s door and leaves a noose behind in her room.
Master calls out the enduring specter of racism, and to its credit, complicates the message. Unctuous politically correct college administrators and PR campaigns about “inclusivity” and “diversity” are satirized. Jasmine comes in conflict with Black English professor Liv Beckman (Amber Gray) over the latter’s exegesis of The Scarlet Letter. Beckman grades Jasmine’s Hawthorne paper with an F, not because it’s badly written but because it doesn’t endorse the professor’s fashionable academic theorizing. Jasmine feels judged by Beckman as an intellectually unprepared ghetto child when—in reality—she grew up in suburbia and was her high school valedictorian. The complaint Jasmine files threatens to derail Beckman from her tenure track, an academic advancement some think is based less on merit than the appearance of faculty diversity. And then the story gets more twisted …
Master is a film with nearly as many loose ends as good ideas (what’s with those townies dressed up like Pilgrims?). Many of the best moments illuminate the casual torment and the subtle racism Jasmine experiences day by day. As the Black in the room, she is always excluded, under suspicion, the perennial Other in a society that pretends racism is history. However, in Master, history is a noisy ghost that won’t go away.
Master opens Friday, March 18 at the Downer Theater and Marcus Southshore Cinemas.
