Master premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and will arrive on Prime Video on March 18, 2022.
Despite the many horror tropes it employs, Master — director Mariama Diallo’s feature debut — is more dependent on lurking, lingering uncertainties than on startling jump scares. The story of three Black women at a mostly white New England college, the film lures its characters, and us, into an urban legend about a Salem-era gallows beneath the university grounds. However, its slow-burn unfurling reveals an ingenious approach to looming specters and things that go bump in the night, leading to an emotionally charged payoff that cements it as a worthy entry in the modern Black horror canon.
The fictitious Ancaster University — an elite, secluded school whose alumni boasts several U.S. presidents — has never seen a Black dean of students until Gail Bishop (Regina Hall). Her new job as “Master” at one of Ancaster’s student houses comes with the perk of on-campus lodging, where previous Masters, most of them white men, have lived over the centuries. Their portraits remain on the walls. Their dark secrets remain hidden in boxes in the attic, in memories evoked by bells in the servants’ quarters, which ring unprompted, and in corners filled with maggot-infested rot, which have long been left unattended. Gail’s only ally on campus is her old friend Liv Beckman (Amber Grey), a mixed-race Black literature professor, whose attempts to stake her claim within the largely white Ancaster system — and whose opportunism, as she fights to be granted tenure — creates an uneasy dynamic with Gail, and with an incoming Black student, Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee).
Jasmine is one of the only non-white kids in the class of 2023. When she arrives for her first semester, the room she moves into — number 302 — is revealed to have a dark history of its own, about which the older students snicker. They eventually tell her tales of previous tragedies that have befallen 302’s residents, and of a witch who appears before one freshman each year, precisely at 3:33 in the morning, though it’s unclear how much of this story is true and how much is being spun to prank her. It certainly doesn’t help that Jasmine sleepwalks, and is already prone to seeing things that may or may not exist.
This uncertainty, about what may or may not be, is the movie’s visual and thematic backbone, but it isn’t limited to the way spooky stories might physically manifest. At first, it takes subdued form, like a classroom assignment Liv gives Jasmine, which involves applying a critical racial lens to The Scarlet Letter, a reading Jasmine believes can’t be found in the text. However, their disagreement not only emanates outward in the plot (Jasmine files a dispute, which puts Liv’s tenure in jeopardy), but it unlocks the film’s approach to racial tension. At its core, Master is not only about the resurgence of overt racist horrors swept under the rug, but about trying to discern the meaning behind minor interactions, when they may — or may not — have ulterior motives.
Where a film like Get Out was dependent on clarity of intent — the perturbed responses of its protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) drew a straight and knowing line between well-intentioned statements and their underlying meaning — Master instead obfuscates these answers. Statements, accusations, and even compliments are often uncanny, with shots lingering on the speaker, as if the camera were trying to suss out their meaning. These are met with reaction shots from Jasmine, Gail, and Liv that are far less certain. They don’t know, but some part of them always suspects, forcing them into a constant state of guarded-ness. They’re always on edge. To those who might levy accusations (at this film, or at any film, or at people in general) about reading racism into too many scenarios, Master responds in exacting fashion, as if to frame these very readings, even supposedly “unnecessary” ones, as a means to navigate the world — as mechanisms to survive an America where you can never truly be sure.
Many scenes are likely to conjure distinct memories for non-white students who attended mostly white universities; several, of course, apply to Black women in particular, like when Jasmine begins straightening her hair to fit in, or the way even white foreigners seem to find acceptance much more quickly than she does. Diallo crafts not only realistic moments that inject the characters’ outlooks with paranoia — like Jasmine walking into her dorm room to find her roommate Amelia (Talia Ryder) seated with a large group of all-white strangers, most of whom already know each other, and all of whom turn to stare at Jasmine — but she also draws on these images and turns them into heightened visions later on when Jasmine sleepwalks, and she begins hearing whispers in the air.
The lines between dream and reality blur once Jasmine begins to feel the pressure of her new surroundings, allowing cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby to let loose and have fun. In these moments, scenes begin to take on a stylistic bent more typical of studio horror; the warm nighttime palette is replaced by dark shadows and flickering lights that envelope the screen, as washes of red pour through nearby windows. It’s all overt and obvious, but Jasmine’s white peers don’t seem to notice. It’s something only she can see. The college experience is a horror movie only to her. In Master, terror is deeply personal, even when it takes sweeping visual form, like snaking Steadicam shots that mirror Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as Jasmine runs though the campus grounds to evade shapeless forms that may or may not be out to get her. The film piles on trope after trope, from strange events that occur at a specific time on the clock, to scenes of analog research in an empty library, to poring through old diaries to find clues that might solve the riddles of the past. But unlike most other movies that use these ideas, the unseen horrors in Master are not something that can be out-researched, out-smarted, or out-run. They certainly can’t be defeated by rhetoric, as implied by a hilarious hard cut from an apparent hate crime to the impotent platitudes of a campus diversity video made in response (the film frequently has a sense of humor about its heavy subject matter).
Ultimately, the Kubrick influence is key. For one thing, composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe creates an eerie soundscape that not only incorporates the bells which Gail seems to constantly hear, and the whispers which haunt Jasmine, but he does so in a way that evokes the harsh, unsettling sounds of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Utrenja,” a composition which Kubrick used in The Shining. The visual evocations of Kubrick may be limited to only a handful of scenes, but the two films share thematic connections — The Shining’s Overlook Hotel was similarly built on cursed ground with its own history of racial horrors — so Master also draws from Kubrick’s imagery to craft its surprising conclusion, which, though it takes its time arriving, helps punctuate the movie’s point about how the past still manifests in the present, but in a way that feels unexpectedly moving.
While the dialogue often comes right out and states the underlying themes, these scenes come across less as preaching, and more as cries be understood, thanks to the performances at hand. Hall in particular laces her role with exhaustion and despondency, which injects even the most on-the-nose interactions with heartbreaking desperation. After a while, any sense of “message” or “statement” ends up buried beneath a grueling, pervading pessimism about the state of things.
Whatever prevalent issues Master is about, it harbors an awareness that simply being about them, as a single piece of art, is unlikely to make a dent to the vast machinery of white supremacy, and the new forms it continues to take. All it can do is try to put words to unspoken experiences. All it can do is create lasting images out of intimate horrors that live both in the shadows and out in the open, in glances that linger just a little too long.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3H09eFU
This could be a real lead forward for personal gaming... Revolutionise gaming
No comments:
Post a Comment