There’s a lot going on in this movie from first-time feature director Mariama Diallo – a pointed and intensely pessimistic horror-satire on racism and identity politics on the American campus. It could be that its material isn’t fully absorbed into the screenplay, but there is real claustrophobia and unease in each insidious microaggression.
The setting is an imaginary Ivy League school in New England which now shrilly prides itself on its diversity, where Jasmine (Zoe Renee), a new student and young woman of colour, is unnerved to hear rumours that the room she has been assigned was where the university’s first black female student took her own life in the 1960s. Meanwhile, in a kind of generational-anxiety parallel, Gail Bishop (Regina Hall), a distinguished scholar with a respected publication record, is thrilled but nervous to have been appointed the first black woman “master” of one of the university’s constituent houses. (The word of course has queasy plantation echoes.)
