Master review: Regina Hall stars in Amazon’s chilling, relentless horror

Polygon’s team reports from the virtual grounds of 2022 Sundance International Film Festival. They will be reporting on the latest independent films in science-fiction, horror and documentary.

Allegorical horror has become a popular genre with filmmakers from marginalized groups, and it’s easy to understand why: Horror stories can make difficult topics more approachable, and they find funding and audiences more easily than just about any other genre right now. Emotionally and stylistically, they’re also a perfect canvas for expressing rage and fear. But they’re difficult to get right tonally. They can look too rigidly didactic if the imagery of horror is not linked with the theme. The association can look too loose and the horror elements could end up appearing like grisly set dressing on a drama-on-the-social.

MasterMariamaDiallo’s debut film, “The Infernal”, is an arresting and powerful feature. It follows this same line, though not with the exact precision that Diallo has. It’s a tale of racism and exclusion at an Ivy League college, but it’s also a story about a good old-fashioned New England witch haunting. These two themes are intertwined tightly and seem to complement each other. However, Diallo fails to make the connections between them, often making it frustrating. Through the entire film, there is a consistent mood of tension and anxiety. Scarier than the hauntings is the microaggressions, twisted racism and political politics that make every conversation a minefield.

Master Two Black women navigate a new academic school year at fictional Ancaster College. Jasmine (Zoe Renee), a shy, coltish freshman from Tacoma is dressed in plain hair and simple clothes. Gail (Regina Hall) is an established faculty member who has just been appointed as the college’s first Black “Master” — the institution’s antiquated term for a head of house, and a word heavy with uncomfortable echoes.

Those echoes can be heard everywhere on Ancaster’s genteel, historic campus. Gail is proud to move into her beautiful red-brick lodge. However, she finds that the house, which has many reminders of Black slavery and subjugation, is not for her. Jasmine moves in a room campus legends say is haunted. A student died in the room decades ago, a death linked to a “curse” placed on the school by Margaret Millett, a woman who was hanged for witchcraft on the site centuries earlier. It’s said that Millett’s ghost shows itself to one freshman every year, and at the moment of her own death at 3:33 a.m., takes the student with her to hell.

Gail and Jasmine both begin to sense vague but disturbing omens. Maggots are seen in paintings, or the faces of college greats in portraits. They then start hearing cadaverous screams. These classic moments of horror imagery can be both chillingly and horrifying. Diallo, and Charlotte Hornsby the cinematographer glide past these images rather than scaring people with jump scares. Unnerved characters slide back into campus routine, but their unease is there. MasterMoves like a cat. Stealthy, purposeful and with an even gait. It’s an impressive feat of control from a first-time director.

It is clear that these women feel disquiet and alienation in every encounter, regardless of how ordinary, while trying to make a home for themselves in a white supremacy bastion. Much like Jordan Peele’s You must get out, Diallo’s scalpel-sharp screenplay constructs scene after fraught scene of coded racial friction, alive to the many different ways that racism can poison the well — blatant or subtle, malevolent or condescending, inter- or intra-racial. As they make rap music at parties, fraternity brothers shout the N-word with aggressive appropriation. Jasmine is treated as a hostile by a Black canteen worker who attempts to make herself feel welcome among the white students. Celebrating Gail’s promotion, the white professors ask if they should call her “Barack” now. White students find a casual facility with a Black professor’s critical race theory reading of The Scarlet LetterJasmine challenges the situation and gets marked down.

This professor Liv, (Amber Gray), grows to be an ever more prominent figure. Master’s story broadens and deepens, though she remains strangely ambiguous. She’s a friend and comrade-in-arms to Gail, and she’s fighting for tenure. Jasmine files a complaint against Liv over the failing grade, which complicates Gail’s position as she tries to advocate for her friend and improve the school’s dismal record for diversity. The system seems to have turned three women against each others, or at best, has enmeshed them in an unethical web that is bound to their fates, even though they only asked for chairs at the table. Master is relentlessly on point in its attacks on white privilege, but it’s justified in that targeting. And Diallo’s sophistication and sangfroid as a filmmaker, coupled with her canny use of genre, prevent the film from turning into a diatribe.

Within the film’s surprisingly complex setup, the outright horror of the witch haunting is the bluntest instrument. It’s used to ratchet up the sense of danger as Jasmine burrows deeper into hostile territory, is ostracized by her classmates, and researches the earlier student death in her room. Honestly, the haunting doesn’t always mesh with the real social horrors she faces. But it does allow Hornsby to frame some strikingly creepy shots, breaking up her austere, autumnal compositions with walls of red and slashes of black, embedded in Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s ominous, droning score. Hornsby, Diallo, and others create layers and metaphorical images. They are subtler, but still linger. These Black women are still cleaning up the mess, generations after the maid whose memory haunts Gail’s house.

Zoe Renee is Jasmine’s sister. MasterIts emotional core. Regina Hall is its anchor. She’s as magnetic and quiet as ever in this place. Help the girls. Hall’s film is well-received by Amber Gray as her unpredictable and brittle foil. Diallo’s steady presence is a great help to her in making the brave decision not to resolve her themes, but rather complicate them.

Diallo is using horror for her social drama? Maybe, but Master’s creeping, wintry style suggests she has a real affinity for the genre at its most chilling and Kubrickian. And while the haunting is never explicitly linked to the college’s grotesque enshrinement of privilege and bigotry, they inspire similar dread. They both involve history reaching back into the past and pulling people into darkness.

Master Amazon Prime Video’s March 18 release date will be announced.