Written and directed by Mariama Diallo, Master follows three women who strive to find their place at a prestigious New England university whose frosty elitism may disguise something sinister.
Regina Hall plays Professor Gail Bishop, who was recently promoted to “Master” of a residence hall, being the first Black woman to attain the post in the prestigious Ancaster College.
Determined to breathe new life into a centuries-old tradition, Gail soon finds herself wrapped up in the trials and tribulations of Jasmine Moore, played by Zoe Renee, an energetic and optimistic Black freshman.
Jasmine’s time at Ancaster hits a snag early on when she’s assigned a dorm room that is rumored to be haunted. Things get worse when Jasmine clashes in the classroom with Liv Beckman, played by Amber Gray, a professor in the middle of her own racially charged tenure review.
As Gail tries to maintain order and fulfill the duties of a Master, the cracks show in Ancaster’s once-immaculate facade. After a career spent fighting to make it into Ancaster’s inner circle, Gail must confront the horrifying prospect of what lies beneath, her question ultimately becoming not whether the school is haunted but by whom.
As her feature film debut, Diallo first encountered the idea of a college “Master” when she was an undergraduate at Yale. Faculty members oversaw an undergraduate residence called Masters, shaping these communities’ cultural and intellectual life and helping students navigate academic and personal problems. A long-standing tradition at elite British universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, Yale adopted it in the 1930s.
Diallo recalls some of the older students downplaying the term’s connotation of enslavement. “It was very slickly normalized,” she says. “They induct you into this crazy system where they just tell you, ‘We know it sounds weird to call somebody master, but it’s nothing to do with slavery.’ And I was able to accept that in a remarkably and disturbingly short amount of time. So for my four years, it was just completely normal to have this person in your life who you would call Master so-and-so. They’re the person who you go to talk to if you’re having trouble in a class or if you’re feeling homesick or anything like that.”
But several years after graduating, Diallo ran into the former Master of her residential college and saw the title in a different light. “I was so excited to see him that I called out hello, addressing him as Master. He looked hugely uncomfortable because we were in earshot of a ton of people. It was almost like our kink was discovered. It’s a relationship that could only exist within the university gates. Anyway, we went on to have a lovely conversation. But as soon as I walked away, I told myself I had to make a film about it because it really threw into relief how bizarre that term, that relationship is. And I knew I wanted to call it Master because of the multiple layers of meaning.”
In response to student protests, Yale eliminated the term in 2016 — several years after Diallo graduated.
From that germ of an idea, Diallo drafted a screenplay that told the connected stories of three women at fictional Ancaster College: Professor Gail Bishop, the school’s first African-American Master; Jasmine Moore, a bright, optimistic incoming freshman; and Liv Beckman, an outspoken professor seeking tenure.
The movie streams on Amazon Prime.