Mariama Diallo’s debut feature film Master, which she wrote and directed, deftly navigates several registers in terms of genre—slipping from supernatural horror to intellectual drama to psychological thriller and back again.
, until students lobbied to have the title changed because it invoked legacies of slavery. For her fictional part, Gail moves into an old house on campus traditionally lived in by the Master—and yet, from her first night, the house itself seems to resist her authority, drawing her over and over to the abandoned attic servant’s quarters where bells ring without the intervention of human hands.
Gail moves into an old house on campus traditionally lived in by the Master—and yet the house itself seems to resist her authority, drawing her over and over to the abandoned attic servant’s quarters where bells ring without the intervention of human hands. Torn between caring for the increasingly distressed Jasmine and negotiating between Liv and the rest of the faculty, Gail struggles to separate her own feelings of unease and repeated eerie encounters with Jasmine’s fear and paranoia. Believing Jasmine’s experiences to be no more than manifestations of racialized anxiety in a mostly white space, Gail tells the young woman, “It’s not ghosts. It’s not supernatural. It’s America”—a sentiment that paves the way for further tragedy.
Another particularly arresting element of the film is its use of tropes familiar to lovers of stories of witches and ghosts—the dark netherworld under the bed, the slippage between nightmare and reality, the unexplainable noises of haunted homes.