Writer and director Mariama Diallo’s debut feature, Master, explores the challenges faced by two Black women at a prestigious New England university that continues to be haunted by ghosts of the past, figurative and perhaps literal.
Gail Bishop (played by Regina Hall) has just been appointed the school’s first Black master, a prestigious faculty position overseeing a residence hall. (A holdover from elite British universities, it’s a glorified, proto-resident adviser.) But the predominantly white (and fictional) Ancaster College, which is almost as old as America itself, has a dark past it can’t seem to shake, as the site of a Salem-era witch trial and hanging. According to campus lore, the witch now haunts the grounds, and as freshman Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee) learns upon her arrival, her room in particular is said to be inhabited by a malignant force; the school’s first Black student killed herself there in the late 60s, she discovers.
