Racism real horror in college-set thriller ‘Master’
Filmmaker excised microaggressions writing spooky tale
For filmmaker Mariama Diallo, writing “Master,” a “spooky drama” about Black women navigating the politics at a tony New England college, was a way of excising the microaggressions and racism she had suppressed during her undergraduate years at Yale.
“I had some similar experiences to the ones you see in the film, and I had a lot to unpack and process from that time,” she said. “It was kind of screaming at me to be told.”
Her debut feature, which recently premiered at Sundance and is now available in select theaters and on Prime Video, stars Regina Hall as professor Gail Bishop, the first Black woman to hold the titular post at Ancaster College, an elite Northeastern institution.
“The master position is one that I lifted from my own experience at Yale,” said Diallo. “It’s almost like a dean of students, but there are several of them tied to specific residence halls. It was alarmingly normalized to the students in a way that, in retrospect, was almost abusive. You’re inculcated into this system where you’re given a master and before you know it, you’re calling somebody ‘master’ and heading over to the Master’s House to ask them for advice. And that does trickle into your consciousness in one way or another, no matter how the school might try to explain away the origins of the term.”
The story is deeply personal for Diallo, whose mother is a retired academic who spent her entire professional career battling similar struggles
to Gail. “I always knew I wanted to follow a Black woman who has been promoted into this role and is grappling with everything that that means,” she said. “What I always found compelling about it was the obvious contradiction of a Black woman being named master, thinking back to the historical sense of the word in this country.”
The film splits its narrative between the perspectives of Gail and Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), an optimistic freshman who quickly finds herself the target of subtle and not-so-subtle racism coming at her from all angles: her fellow students, school staff and even the ghost of a Salem-era witch rumored to make students suicidal.
Diallo began imagining Hall for the role of Gail after seeing her dramatic turn in 2018’s “Support the Girls.”
“I was holding out hope for so long that we would be able to get her because I think that beyond a horror, ‘Master’ is kind of balancing a lot of different tones,” said Diallo. “And I had always known Regina to be a very flexible actor and really multitalented. She’s a natural comedian, but she’s also such a gifted dramatic actress. I hadn’t seen her in a horror film, but I suspected that she would be able to pull that off as well.”
She wrote Hall a letter outlining why she’d be perfect for the role and sent it over with a copy of the script. Hall’s agents responded three days later to set up a meeting. “I thought the way (Diallo) was able to tackle themes like race in the horror genre with the backdrop of elite academia was really smart and timely and very well done,” said Hall. “Mariama is so smart. She had such a
vision for her film.”
“At its core, it really is the story of the characters,” said Diallo. “It’s about their experiences and evolution over the course of the film.”
Jasmine and Gail’s way of dealing with the difficulties of their situations are to avoid them by adopting a nonconfrontational attitude. This way of coping comes in sharp relief to outspoken professor Liv Beckman (Amber Gray), Gail’s friend who is up for tenure.
“We see Gail, Jasmine and Liv all take different approaches to how they’re dealing with being in this space and how they’re trying to navigate their friends and colleagues,” said Diallo. “They’re all representing different facets of the way that a person might try to move in such a hostile space: We have Jasmine who’s in denial for so much of the film. She really doesn’t
want to acknowledge what’s going on around her because it’s just too difficult, which feels close in a lot of respects to my own experience.
“And then Gail is optimistic to a fault, self-denying and just trying to forge through,” she added. “She’s got this Obama-era hopefulness of coming in and shaking up the system and moving the school away from some aspects of its history and its past. But I think that what Gail discovers as the film goes on is that that was not at all the school’s intention in hiring her and that is not the role that she’s actually meant to play.”
“Part of (Gail’s) identity is invested in being a success and in proving not just to herself but to a larger society, ‘Hey, Black women can be masters, we can do this,’ ” said Hall. “She put a lot into her education, into an academic life, into achievement. It probably took a long time to become a master: being tenured, writing published works. It’s not an easy journey.
“Liv takes advantage of their need to diversify because she has her own agenda,” said Hall. “Gail goes in there probably believing that she’s making a change, and Jasmine is the result of that oppressive culture. She can’t quite find her footing. She’s really trying to fit in and be like everyone else, but the reality of what’s going on around her — that with the haunting, whether that’s real or symbolic — it does seem to seep into (her emotional world).”
The resultant film, with its themes of both suppression and oppression, feels chokingly claustrophobic. “I think just setting it inside that world of Ancaster College, it felt like there was no way out,” said Hall. “Gail didn’t feel like she had a way out, Liv didn’t feel like she had a way out, and Jasmine definitely didn’t feel like she had a way out. Even the people in the village, they felt kind of suppressed. Everything felt suppressed. It didn’t really feel like anyone’s voice was being heard or even being stated. You never really felt Gail really assert her voice. There was a lot of physical and emotional isolation in the movie.”
“I’ve heard back from many, many Black people — Black women in particular — who have been in some of these similar spaces and institutions, and they’ve remarked how true it feels to their experience and how validating and even surprising it is to see it represented on-screen in a way that it hasn’t before,” said Diallo. “People of all different races have told me they’ve seen commonalities between the characters and their own experiences of isolation in certain spaces. That’s been really cheering to me.”