Premise: A black student and professor at a mostly white fictional Ivy League school navigate unsettling experiences.
Ever since Get Out, a lot of filmmakers have been taking a stab at mixing horror and racism. That’s not to say Get Out was the first to try it. It was just the big success that either convinced more filmmakers to try it or more studios to fund similar projects. Master will likely get bucketed in that group of movies, although I think it actually shares more with the other brand of “arty horror” coming out of Sundance the last few years, like The Witch and Hereditary. Master is a very moody movie that says the loud part quietly.
I really like that it’s broken into two stories. There’s Regina Hall as a tenured professor who keeps discovering all the racism built into the bricks of the university. Then there’s Zoe Renee, a freshman who is experiencing a similar “othering” in a more straightforwardly horror way. She has nightmares and her dorm room has a dark history to it. She’s getting targeted by the other students.
What’s cool is that the movie denies the audience traditional horror payoff. It builds a collection of indignities that Hall and Renee suffer throughout. I watched all of it wondering what it’s building to. Maybe something supernatural. Maybe a revenge story. Instead, it basically says “No. The horror was those indignities”. I read it as equivalent to asking why someone needs to die before people care about police brutality. It’s all very smartly done. It isn’t rubbing the audience’s noses in anything. Instead, it just highlights how things can get so bad that we hardly notice them or opt to wait until they become undeniable.
Verdict: Strongly Recommend
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